


The Knots that Bind

by MaryMonster



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Biting, Blood Magic, Blow Jobs, Cunnilingus, F/M, Fisting, Knotting, Lactation Kink, Pregnant Sex, Romance, Smut, Sweet, Witches, discussion of incest, try-hard magical spell poetry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:13:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23855914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryMonster/pseuds/MaryMonster
Summary: Rey is a witch who tries to use magic to mend her broken heart. But when the village blacksmith shows up naked outside her cottage, she finds she may not need a spell after all.A sweet, ABO love story.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey
Comments: 102
Kudos: 348





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **  
>  [Moodboard](https://marymonster.tumblr.com/post/616465375589269504/the-knots-that-bind-by-marymonster-rey-is-a-witch)   
>  **

Three whole days Rey spent in bed, rising for the basic functions of her body and for nothing else. Her heart was broken. Everything hurt. She would never love again. On the fourth day, Bumblebee pounced on her repeatedly until she rose from her mattress that smelled of salty tears and sweat. Her head was cloudy and her muscles were surprisingly sore from her days of inactivity. Wrapping herself tightly in a shawl, she moved to the kitchen.

“You come and go as you please,” she grumbled at the orange tabby with snowy white paws that wound between her legs. “The forest can feed you. The stream can sate your thirst. You do not need me.”

Bumblebee meowed loudly and rubbed his head against her shin. _But only you can love me._ Tears welled in her eyes once more and she roughly scrubbed them away; she wasn’t going to fall back to her sobbing so soon. She shuffled past the table and the two wooden chairs that dominated the space and approached the bookshelf across from the hearth. As she scanned the spines of the spell books, she ran her fingers through the dried bouquets of herbs and flowers that were nailed to the shelf’s lower edge. With a sigh, she plucked a tome with a purply leather cover. Flipping through the pages, she found it- a salve for a broken heart. 

It was simple, sympathetic magic, but it would take time. She was to plant knotgrass and when the summer sun was at its acme, she would need to harvest the tallest sprigs, brew them into a tea and take three sips. It was still the earliest days of spring and the whole world smelled of mud. It would be three full moons before the Midsummer, but her pain was so raw she could foresee no end to it, so she returned the book to the shelf and went to inspect her jars of seeds. Listless as she was, it took the length of the afternoon to plant the knotgrass. When she was finished, the seeds were earthed from the threshold of her cottage to several paces beyond; she wouldn’t be taking any chances. 

Rey didn’t feel at all better yet despite the simple pride of completing her task and the healing nature of fresh air, but she was up out of bed, covered in wet earth, and she was hungry. She cut some of the early shoots that grew in her window box and retrieved an apple from the barrel in her cellar before sharing a few pieces of dried rabbit with Bumblebee. It wasn’t much but it was more of a meal than the few bites she’d had to sustain herself over the past few days. 

With the clarity of mind that came with a fed stomach, she registered how poorly she smelled. Bumblebee followed her loyally to and from the stream that rushed through the beech trees just beyond her cottage’s clearing. Six trips laden down by a wooden bucket were required to fill her metallic tub. Bumblebee cried as she scrubbed herself until her skin looked more pink than tan. The usual glow of her golden witch’s mark was faint, lost in the shallow valley between her breasts. She was shivering hard and her teeth rattled as she stood to dry herself. She’d been too tired to fully heat the water by the fire before she had climbed in and her heart was too heavy to conjure warmth by magic.

Now clean, she slipped back into bed. The sheets needed washing but that could wait for another day or two. The garden she kept behind her cottage would have to be weeded tomorrow and she would need to be quick about it so she could get to the village market in time to vend a few fresh spring herbs. She was about an hour’s walk from where most people lived in this stretch of The Wilds. Tomorrow she couldn’t linger in bed.

Bumblebee crawled up onto Rey’s pillow and purred contentedly as his rough tongue groomed her damp hair. Maybe, she thought as her wakefulness blurred into the first threads of dreams, maybe tomorrow might hurt a bit less. 

The air hung heavily in the bright heat of the sun and the ravens danced on the roof of the cottage. The summer solstice had finally arrived, and Rey had spent the afternoon meticulously searching out the tallest specimens of her knotgrass crop that now brushed along her shins. It was a gnarled, flowering grass, with thick stalks and small waxy leaves. No one would ever plant it intentionally for its beauty. But the ugly weed with its tiny white flowers had endeared itself to her; she had found some hope walking out into the green sea of it in the mornings. She would be sorry for it to go when she finally reclaimed her clearing.

Retreating to her cottage, she brewed the sprigs and took three sips. Her impatience caused the hot liquid to scald the tip of her tongue; the bitter, earthy flavor radiated from her mouth out into the rest of her body. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her heart. She felt both lighter and stronger. It had been far too long since she’d been free of the ache in her chest.

Rey stroked Bumblebee’s glowing fur before gathering a few items for the solstice celebration. The village would be congregating for the annual bonfire and she didn’t want to miss it now that she was unburdened. This was one of the four times of the year that as the resident witch she was to be honored. Her thoughts were bright, and she practically floated down the forest path carrying the wildflower wreaths she’d woven.

When she reached the village green the sun was sunk low in the sky and the final preparations for the bonfire were nearly finished. Rey smiled and made small talk with some of the other villagers. She kept to herself most days, preferring the company of her cat, and only venturing to the village once a month to sell her herbs and to buy food she did not grow herself. But this was the Midsummer celebration, and her mood was merry to match the cheery atmosphere.

Rey handed out her wreaths to the children and whispered spells of good fortune to everyone who pressed coins into her palm. Women in search of true love, kissed her cheeks. In return, she pinned bells to their dresses, the soft tinkling promising to lure only good matches closer. 

Two young sisters with raven hair claimed the last wreaths as Rey pinned her last bell to the breast of their widow mother. Spinning round with a candescent smile on her face, Rey moved into the warmth of the bonfire. As she drew close to the flames suddenly the whole world went cold: _He_ was standing there. A pained energy pulsed in her and her legs begged her to run but she was fixed to the spot where she stood. He hadn’t seen her; he would have turned tail if he had. She’d been so careful these past three months to avoid his routes and his usual places.

At first, all she could see was his handsome face with smart eyes and an amused mouth but then her view broadened, and she saw his strong arms, the very same ones that used to hold her. And then his hands. Hands that were now touching someone else. Not just anyone, but a woman with an easy, ethereal beauty and a belly so swollen she must have fallen pregnant at least seven months ago. His hands were on her, one on the nape of her neck, stroking her skin, and one brushing over her belly.

He turned, and his eyes met Rey’s and she found she was frozen no longer; she fled. He’d been standing along the path that led back to her cottage so now the farther she ran the farther she was from home. The world was dismally dark with her back to the bonfire and she stumbled and nearly fell to the ground. It was too dangerous to run blindly in the low light so she ducked into the next door she came to. The room she entered was empty; all the villagers would be gathered for the celebration by now. She slumped to the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees. The knotgrass tea hadn’t worked at all. Her heart, that thundered against her sternum in panic and exertion, was crumbling to pieces once more. She let a breathy curse fly.

“Who’s there?” called a man’s voice from the shadows.

Rey rose up quickly and was about to slip out the door when a lantern was lit and the room billowed with light. She turned back to find a very tall man staring at her. His long dark hair framed his stoic expression.

“We’re closed,” he said.

She took note of his accent and the large metal tools and the dormant forge that were now visible in the lantern light. He was the blacksmith, she realized, and she was in his shop. They’d never met but she’d heard plenty of gossip about him when he had arrived in the village about a year ago. He’d been a soldier across the Nebula sea who had been captured during the war. After the truce, instead of returning home, he had ventured inland until settling in her tiny village deep within The Wilds. 

“Sorry,” she murmured, trying to make amends for her intrusion, but her voice cracked, and she couldn’t explain herself further for fear of bursting into tears.

“Can I help you?” he asked. He was appraising her with his dark eyes and she felt uneasy. 

What help for a broken heart could a blacksmith give a witch? But then she remembered the small crop of knotgrass outside her cottage and the thought twisted her insides. She decided right then to lay waste to it and have her own bonfire that night. 

“I need a sickle,” she said. 

“If you want something new, you will have to come back in two days.”

She couldn’t imagine the prospect of returning to the village so soon after her humiliation. She should just forget it, but she began to speak again against her better judgement. “And if I need a sharp tool tonight?”

The blacksmith eyed her more sternly now. “You need to make hay tonight?”

Discomforted by his scrutiny, she said, “Pay me no heed,” and turned to leave but she couldn’t find it in herself to push open the door. She just stood there dumbly staring at it. 

She must have looked extraordinarily pathetic because the blacksmith offered, “If you prefer, you can wait, and I can sharpen a discarded one.”

“Please!” she said. Anything to avoid having to go back out into the celebration. She perched on a small stool and watched as the man worked. He dug out a curved blade from a pile of old and damaged tools and plied it to the whetstone. As he guided the rusty metal over the stone, she couldn’t help but notice how his muscles rippled beneath his shirt. She caught herself imagining how he would look in front of the forge, his arms swinging the hammer and sweat holding his top to the hard angles of his torso.

He turned then, and she felt her cheeks catch fire. He arched an eyebrow but said nothing as he handed her the sickle.

“How much?” she asked sheepishly, wondering if the small coins in the leather pouch on her hip would be enough.

“No charge.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I am the one who collects favors and as a rule I never incur debts,” she said tersely. She didn’t need his charity nor his trickery.

“No favors. No debts. It’s a poor blade even sharpened, it wouldn’t have been of any value to me,” he said.

Rey was the one to level him with an appraising stare now. To her surprise, she saw that he was telling the truth.

“For the labor then,” she said as she pulled at the strings of her pouch.

“Consider it a goodwill gesture of the solstice,” he said, “You believe in that stuff, don’t you?” 

Rey’s lips pulled into a straight line as her fingers automatically moved to the Midsummer ribbons that were tied to her wrist. He didn’t know, she realized, that she was the village witch, or else he wouldn’t have chanced insulting her. If he didn’t know who she was then he wasn’t trying to wriggle a favor from her; he was just being kind.

“A Midsummer blessing then,” she said softly, stepping in front of him before he could protest and laying her hands on him, one on his heart and one on his shoulder. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before reciting-

“ _Gaia’s wheel lifts the sun to full height_  
_fire burns earth til the mud glows bright_  
_the world’s hearth brims with fertile soil_  
_and so shall your heart be made light_ ”

Pushing up onto her toes, Rey laid a kiss to his cheek. Without meeting his eyes, she gathered her sickle and delved back into the darkness.

Rey hacked through the knotgrass outside her door, every stalk fell at her will, the sharpened blade making quick work of the task. The sickle wasn’t as useless as the blacksmith had portrayed for which she was grateful. Gathering the gnarled grass, she made a pile, intent on starting a fire, but in the end, she couldn’t. The fresh scent of the cut grass reminded her of the fleshy smell of new growth. It would be wrong to exchange it for the charred, smoky flavor of defeat.

Exhausted and chilled without the flames she’d meant to set, Rey finally headed inside and laid down on her bed. Bumblebee curled up beside her; her body and her heart ached. She’d been so certain that the spell would work that she’d never considered what she would do if it failed. She pressed her cheek against Bumblebee and let the soothing roll of his purr comfort her. Despite the emotional hills and valleys of the night, she fell swiftly into the arms of sleep.

The first light of dawn was crawling across her bed when Bumblebee dropped his claws into the skin of her thigh and yowled.

“Ow!” she yelped right back at him and pushed him away. He thumped onto the floor but instead of running off in anger, he began spinning circles and crying.

“What is it?” she asked now worried.

Bumblebee darted from the bedroom to the living room. Grabbing a shawl, she followed. Nothing seemed amiss until she spotted the cat staring at the door with his back arched. He was a tough tomcat and she’d never seen him threatened like this.

Opening the door just a crack, she caught sight of a man lying on the ground, pillowed by the hewn knotgrass. He was naked, and his face was turned away. His pale skin shone brightly, and she couldn’t help but notice that he sported what is known as a man’s morning glory.

She was about to retreat back into the house for some sort of weapon when he began to stir. His face tilted towards her now in the pinkening light of the dawn and to her surprise she recognized him - the blacksmith was on her front lawn. Roused from his sleep, he pushed up onto his elbows and looked around with utter confusion until his eyes lifted to meet hers. His expression erupted into a flurry of emotions- surprise, then panic, followed by embarrassment before settling into fear.

“What am I doing here?” he demanded.

“I just found you like this!” she snapped. He was a stranger to her and she didn’t need him accusing her of anything untoward. She may have founded a friendly reputation in the village, but she was still a witch, and witches often met early, unnatural ends.

He made to stand up, self-consciously rolling onto his side before scrambling to his feet while covering as much of his erect cock with his hands as he could. As he shuffled away, exposed and clearly uncomfortable, she took pity on him.

“You cannot walk back to your shop like that,” she said. “I don’t know what people are like where you’re from, but folks are a bit conservative here. Showing up in the village green stark-naked is a good way to get run out of town. You're better off waiting for nightfall.”

He stopped and turned back towards her. She pulled her shawl from her shoulders and held out the knitted fabric, leaving her only covered by her thin nightdress. He hesitated but then moved to take her offering and tied it around his waist.

“Thank you,” he said sheepishly.

The shawl wasn’t very big and barely covered the parts of him he seemed intent on concealing, but it provided some modesty which put them both at ease.

“I’m hungry,” she said pointedly, “You can join me for breakfast.” 

She was pleased when he actually followed her into the cottage. He stood awkwardly in the middle of the living room, staring wide-eyed at her various collections of spell-making items until she put him to work preparing a berry compote to spread over the bread she was toasting.

Slowly, gently, she began to coax conversation from him. “My name’s Rey,” she offered.

“Kylo,” he said, “Kylo Ren.”

She handed him a plate and they sat down to her table with the food they’d prepared together. They ate quickly until they had both cleared their plates and Kylo spoke.

“The cut plants outside,” he said, tipping his chin towards the cottage door, “Those are why you needed the sickle?”

She took a long sip from her tea that had finally cooled to her liking. “They were for a spell, but it didn’t work. I was angry, so I razed them.” She was embarrassed to admit her childish behavior but saw no real reason to lie.

She could practically see the wheels of his mind turning behind his dark eyes.

“A spell?” he whispered. 

She nodded with an amused smile.

“Are you…” he began but then trailed off.

“I’m a witch if that’s the word you’re searching for.” 

They lapsed into silence as Kylo turned over this new information and Rey waited to see which way his mind would take him- towards fear or fascination.

“May I ask what kind of spell?”

At least it was fascination, she thought, even though the continued topic of the spell needled her. She lowered her eyes to the golden liquid in her mug and sighed. “It seems so silly now. Knotgrass is supposed to mend a broken heart.” 

Kylo’s eyebrows raised up and his mouth fell open. She readied herself for a question about her failed love but what he asked her next left her as stunned as he looked.

“That plant is called _knotgrass_? Like the knot that forms on a dog’s cock?”

She stared back at him, completely confused. “K-n-o-t,” she spelled, “so yes, like that, I suppose. Or, more commonly, like a tied rope…”

He stood abruptly, the feet of his chair scraping along the dusty floorboards. He moved to the door and opened it to stare out. “Knotgrass,” he said softly to himself, “For heartbreak.”

“Mmhmm.” She watched him carefully as she explained. “It’s a simple spell. I’d never had cause to try it before. You’re to brew a tea with it.”

“What else is it for?” he asked, rounding on her.

Rey shrugged, “Not anything else I know of.” But she rose to retrieve the book where she had found the spell and opened it to the correct page before passing it to Kylo.

He ran his fingers gently over the hand-inked words. “I can’t read this,” he said.

“It’s an older version of the basic tongue.” She moved beside him to see the page. “Roughly, it says:

_When the heart shatters as if glass_  
_Then reap under the highest sun_  
_The tallest sprigs of fresh knotgrass_  
_Brewed tea, three sips forget one"_

“And this here?” Kylo asked, hovering his finger over a faded verse that ran along the rough bottom edge of the page.

“Hmmm,” Rey murmured as she squinted at the tight script, “This was my godmother’s spell book. That’s her handwriting. It says-

‘ _At the poise of night and day, beneath the white skies, the first in true love must fall, for the last to rise_ ’”

“Is that also a spell?” he asked.

“In part, perhaps. My godmother often created new spells. She was very gifted. The ones that are proven are properly inked on their own page in the appropriate book. The ones along the edges, like this, were still being perfected at the time of her death.” 

Kylo stared intently at the page as if only he could concentrate hard enough then the translation would make sense. She found his interest endearing.

“But you don’t believe in that stuff, do you?” she said as she took the spell book from his hands and returned it to the shelf. 

He blinked at her like she’d woken him from a deep thought. “I believe that there are things I don’t understand but that nonetheless are true.”

“That’s well-reasoned.” She’d assumed last night, by his teasing tone about the Midsummer rites, that he didn’t believe in magic, nor witches for that matter. But now, faced by her words, he appeared to accept the presence of the unknown. Open-mindedness was a rare quality and one that Rey prized. 

“Well, you’ve eaten some of my stores,” she said, brushing her hands over her lap, “And you’ve delayed my start to my daily tasks, so you must be put to work.” Her original plan was to have Kylo sit idle while she went about her day but she’d already grown fond of his company.

“If I refuse will you bake me into a cake and feed me to wandering children?” he asked with a playful smirk.

Rey rolled her eyes and laughed, “Everyone knows jokes about witches, but few dare to tell them to my face. You’re much too lean to be good in a cake; I advise you to not refuse me lest you end up in a mealy stew.” 

The rest of the day was lost in the garden, Rey tending her crops with water and whispered words of magic, while Kylo mended the garden wall. They talked lightly around easy topics, and on occasion delved into Kylo’s questions about witchcraft. His interest appeared genuine, and he formed his own understanding for her spells with clever analogies to metalwork with its use of fire and brawn to create something nature had not intended.

Rey found their bits of conversation stimulating, and the passages of silence companionable. She’d never had anyone share in her chores and the sun moved across the sky much quicker for it. Kylo, as expected, was quite handy, and only slightly hampered by his lack of suitable clothing. The shawl for its part clung admirably to his hips, allowing her only brief glimpses of his heavy thighs. His bare chest and back, however, rippled with exertion and shone with sweat. She only allowed herself the odd lingering gaze but twice she was certain Kylo had caught her staring.

When the garden seemed satisfied with their progress, they moved back inside where she fed Kylo a hearty supper worthy of the work he’d done. With a pang of disappointment, she caught sight of the last streams of the setting sun.

“I should go,” he said, “It’s dark enough that no one will notice my skirt.”

Rey openly appraised her shawl; it was dusted with dirt and held a few green stains. “That or their fear of the unusual will dissuade them from confronting a man so confident in his clothing.”

His eyes crinkled with a smile that didn’t quite reach his lips. “I really should go,” he said as he laid a hand on her shoulder, his fingertips glanced briefly over her neck before he dropped his hand and turned.

Rey nodded and followed him to the door. Just as he was about to cross the threshold, she stepped in front of him and placed a light kiss to his lips. Kylo’s mouth twitched against hers for a moment and then he pushed her away.

“Oh!” she said covering her mouth with a hand, “I thought you wanted me to kiss you.”

“I did,” he said, “but we shouldn’t.”

At his words, an awful panic bubbled up in her. Did he already have a lover? Or did he still harbor some simmering fear about her being a witch?

Having read the distress on her face, he stuttered, “I- I can’t be close to anyone.”

“That’s not a reason,” she said, “If you’re not interested you should just say it plainly.”

“I am interested. But it’s difficult to explain.”

Rey, still wounded, wrapped her arms tightly across her chest. “As difficult as explaining magic to a blacksmith?”

Kylo’s expression contorted as he eyed her closely before taking a deep breath. “Have you ever heard of Alphas or omegas in reference to people?”

Her lips instinctively pursed as if she were tasting something sour. Alphas and omegas sounded familiar far back in her brain. Then she remembered.

“When I was a little girl, my godmother gave me a storybook about a Wolf King named Alpha and his daughter Omega. They weren’t really people, but they weren’t fully wolves either. More like savage humans covered in fur who walked on two legs. It wasn’t a very nice book.”

Kylo sighed. “The stories they tell aren’t usually kind.”

The vividly inked pictures of the book came flooding back to her now and the bones of the story gained flesh. “I think the king mated with his daughter and after she had her wolf cubs, he killed her,” she said.

He nodded; his eyes had grown darker in the lessening light of the evening. “I’m quite familiar with a variation of that story, but with a human king and his daughter.”

“Old fairytales are always a bit gruesome; they’re meant to exaggerate some truth to better make a point,” she said, “And to scare children.”

“But the seed of truth is sometimes a whole tree,” he countered. 

Rey fidgeted nervously; she was becoming aware they were discussing more than just fiction and this stream somehow merged back with the river.

“What is it, Kylo? What is it that you are trying to tell me?”

He retreated into the warmth of the cottage and dropped down onto the stone ledge that fronted the hearth. “My family is cursed. We’ve tried to break it, to stamp it out, but we’ve never succeeded.”

Rey sat down as well and calmly stroked Bumblebee who had climbed into her lap. If Kylo was trying to frighten her, it wasn’t working. She was well acquainted with many types of curses and had never been irrevocably harmed by one yet.

“My family’s curse began much like the tale of the wolf king of your storybook. A father impregnating his daughter and then killing her after she gave birth to twins. The twin boy and girl married outside the family and had children of their own. The twin lineages, however, have had a tendency to double back with relatives drawn into marriage with each other.”

Rey smiled sympathetically. “Such things are not that uncommon. Even here in The Wilds cousins can freely marry. An evil man who abused his daughter does not a curse make.”

The bullfrogs that lived on the edge of the stream began their evening ballad. The few candles she had already lit weren’t sufficient to illuminate the whole cottage and long shadows drew over Kylo’s face as he shook his head and continued. “It’s more than that. The descendants have physical abnormalities. The women experience heat much like a female animal. They are compelled to breed and if they cannot find a mate their body is wracked with unimaginable pain until the heat passes.”

“And the men?” 

Kylo sighed heavily. “It is quite difficult to resist an omega in heat. Even ones he would not normally wish to pair with become irresistible.” His pale skin had lost a shade of his natural color and glowed an unnerving white. Rey could only imagine the horrors of such a condition for a young man who had close female relatives.

“And when he does lie with a woman,” Kylo said, “He knots her much like a common dog.”

There it was, she thought, the connection she’d been missing. His peculiar reaction to the knotgrass made sense now. “And the men are referred to as Alphas and the women as omegas?” she asked.

“Generally, yes. Although there are some that display the characteristics of the opposite sex.”

“Are you Alpha, Kylo?” she asked gently.

“Yes.”

They sat quietly for a stretch, Bumblebee’s purr and the dying crackle of the fire the only sounds between them. Finally, Rey spoke again, “It must be difficult to find a partner who is understanding.” 

Kylo nodded. “That is the curse. A lineage sprung forth from incest has made it impossible to find a partner that is not descended from another branch of the family tree. Outsiders are terrified of our unnatural qualities and even those that are not, have difficulty with the physical differences. The inborn desire for one’s own kin is both easier and insistent.”

“Is that why you didn’t return home after the war?” she asked, “I’ve never heard of such a condition occurring in The Wilds.”

“It was my main consideration,” he said, “We arrange marriages in my family to keep everyone as healthy and sane as possible. The most distant cousins are wed. I didn’t want that. But I would have found it impossible to resist if I had returned home.”

“If you’re not around a woman in heat, it doesn’t affect you? You can control your, er, urges?”

Kylo nodded. “As long as I am abstinent.”

Rey blushed and whispered, “That must be very lonely.”

He did not respond. 

The sun had disappeared below the horizon and he stood again to leave. “Thank you, Rey,” he said, “You’ve been a very gracious host, but I have overstayed.”

Her heart hammered unexpectedly in her chest as he stepped out into the night, the scent of the knotgrass reborn by the cool, moist air that had settled over it. She wasn’t ready for him to go. 

“Many people say that witches are unnatural as well,” she blurted as she stepped out the door after him.

Kylo’s body stiffened. “Go back inside,” he said through gritted teeth.

Rey wasn’t scared but the harshness of his tone stung. He was walking away with purpose when she caught up to him and grabbed his arm. She had to use all her strength to turn him back around. 

“What is the point of running away from a family that would choose your partner if you choose no one at all?”

Under her fingers, goosebumps rose along the skin of his upper arm as a shiver raced through Rey to match Kylo’s own chill.

“The knotgrass- it’s scent,” he whispered, “I can’t explain it, but it affects me. Go back inside, Rey. Please.”

But she was not so easily dissuaded. She rose up onto her tiptoes and kissed him again. “But do I not affect you too?” she asked, her lips brushing against his as she spoke.

Kylo’s wariness vanished and he wrapped his arms tightly around her, holding her to his chest as he returned her kiss, his lips silently telling her, _yes oh yes_ , over and over again. She draped her arms over his neck and let her body melt against his. A pleasant pressure brushed against her belly and she realized that kissing her was making him hard. She broke the kiss and stepped back to look him over.

“I think I might need my shawl back now,” she teased. 

He smirked and leapt forward to gather her up in his arms again before lowering them both to the ground, the shawl’s tie was loosed and then the fabric was pushed aside in the desperate movement.

“Kylo,” she whimpered as his cock pressed against her cunt with only the barrier of her skirt between them. She lowered her hands over his bottom, gripping the muscled swells to urge him to rut into her. “I need you inside me.”

The moment caught like silk on a thorn and Kylo froze completely. “Please,” she whispered, running a hand up his back until she cupped the nape of his neck, “I want this.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“You won’t.”

“There are other ways we can…”

Rey drew his lips to hers once more, savoring the soft feel of his mouth. “I know,” she said breaking away, “But I want you this way. I want you as you are.”

She watched him closely as she loosened the laces that held the front of her dress closed, exposing her chest and displaying her witch’s mark. 

“I want you to have me as I am,” she said. Kylo’s eyes went wide as he drew a finger along the intricate design that glowed with each pulse of her heart before bending his head to kiss it. Rey trembled from the tender intimacy of his lips.

“Alright,” he said as he helped her work her dress the rest of the way off. He braced himself on one arm as his free hand dipped between her legs and then drew up her inner thigh. She was soaked already. He slid two fingers inside and her eyes fluttered closed and she smiled. A third and then a fourth finger pushed inside her, and she wiggled her hips a bit as Kylo rolled them in a circle, stretching her.

“I can take more,” she said, stroking the heavy muscle of his upper arm, “I can take you.”

“Tell me to stop,” he said but his voice had grown husky and his eyes had darkened.

“Don’t stop,” she breathed as he tightened his fingers together and eased his thumb in alongside them. Slowly, so, so slowly, he pushed the heft of his palm into her cunt. Rey willed her body to loosen.

“Kiss me,” she said, desperate to maintain her arousal, scared of what would happen if she lost her nerve and tried to pull away.

Kylo licked her lips, and then slipped his tongue into her trembling mouth. Their tongues met and rolled against each other and then he pulled his mouth away just long enough to tell her she was perfect, her body was perfect, her lips, her breasts, and her cunt were perfect, before kissing her once more.

“Relax, sweetheart,” he said and then closed his hand into a fist inside her making her thighs quiver. The sense of fullness had her close to coming but she was too anxious to give herself over to pleasure completely.

Just as slowly, he relaxed his hand and then pulled it from her.

“Will it be like that?” she asked, running her fingers through his inky hair that reflected the soft light of the moon.

“Yes, but I won’t be able to pull out if my knot is blown,” he said, his voice was flat and serious.

The thought of what that would mean if she panicked and tried to disengage from him was unpleasant, but the danger also aroused her.

“Please, Kylo,” she begged. “I want you. I want your knot inside me.”

She could tell he was torn between lust and concern, so she reached down between them to grip his cock. Pressing the head against her entrance, she urged him on with a swivel of her hips. He let her guide him into her warmth, bracing himself up with one arm while the other’s hand cupped her cheek. He was completely inside her now. His rough grunts and the timid shivers along his skin had her wondering if he’d ever done this before with anyone who wasn’t a distant cousin or if he’d ever even done it at all.

The thought of his inexperience soon fleeted as he began pumping into her. With each roll of his hips his pubic bone skimmed along her clit sending thrills through her belly. The fingers that had caressed her cheek slipped to her breast, teasing her nipples to hard points and then twisting them just right to make her whimper.

“Your warmth,” he murmured against her ear before nipping the lobe with his teeth, “You feel incredible.”

Rey’s body arched like a bow string pulled tight and the pulse of her pleasure loosed her. She yelled his name and before she could find herself again, before she remembered she was not the same living thing as Kylo, it happened. His whole body twitched and his cock, that was fully sheathed within her, suddenly began to swell just within her opening. His rapidly growing knot pulsed against the nerves that were gathered in her inner wall. She cried out not in pain but in ecstasy as her body rose and crested once more.

She could feel the hot spurts of his spend filling her up, no matter how much come he spilled in her not a drop leaked out.

“Sweetheart?” Kylo cooed, his lips brushing against her forehead with tender caution. His right hand, however, was firmly gripping her hip, pinning her to prevent her from pulling off his swollen cock.

“Are you alright?” he asked, and she had the distinct impression he had asked her a few times before, but she’d been too overwhelmed to reply.

She swallowed thickly and found her voice. “It’s pulsating against me just right,” she said and then another wave of pleasure rose up inside her and she dug her nails into his shoulders.

“Good girl,” he said, “You can take it. Give in. Don’t fight.”

“It’s too much,” she whined. The muscles of her cunt tingled with the growing pressure of his knot; it was the oddest sensation of her life. It was as if her whole body had constricted into a single inch of her skin while simultaneously her brain had become untethered from her flesh.

“Look at me,” he said sternly and she obeyed. His eyes locked with hers as his hand on her hip strayed to her clit and began stroking it. “Such a greedy little witch,” he said, “needing to come again and again.”

He was working her tiny bundle more fiercely now and it divided her attention from the immense strain of his knot. She couldn’t imagine fitting any more tightly over him than she was now. The pressure was agitating Kylo as well, he chewed his lips and his breaths were labored.

“If you were my omega,” he rambled, all the while stroking her, “You wouldn’t be allowed out of bed. You’d come on my knot at least seven times. You’d be mine. You’d be only mine.”

The touch of his fingertips was proving too much and Rey screamed as she came again, her nails raking deeply into Kylo’s back, her teeth gnashing against his neck. She lost herself and the world went white.

The steady beat of his heart eased her back to consciousness. He had rotated them at some point so she was splayed across his chest. His cock was still buried within her but his knot was almost completely deflated now, the throbbing having faded to only an echo of his heartbeat.

“Kylo,” she murmured as she lifted her head to look at him. His hand that had been stroking her hair crossed over her cheek to cup her chin.

“Do you feel alright?”

“Mmhmm. How long was I…?” She didn’t have the right word for it, she hadn’t been asleep nor had she been fully awake.

“You went somewhere else for a while,” he whispered, “the fireflies have gone back to bed.”

It was the shortest night of the year and the blackcaps would soon commence their morning chorus. Kylo needed to leave now if he still intended to make it back before the earliest risers of the village would see him in the tattered shawl.

Carefully, Rey pushed herself up and off him. Her arms shook violently, completely depleted of strength. She couldn’t hold herself up and she collapsed onto her back. A gush of warm fluid spilled from her cunt, coating her thighs and the knotgrass below her. She was too exhausted to care.

Kylo bridged over her and kissed her lips before working down her naked body. She should have reminded him of the hour but his hot mouth felt exquisite. 

“I can’t,” she whined as his head lowered between her thighs. Her nerves were too raw to be coaxed into pleasure again. But his tongue avoided her clit as he licked her folds until the outside of her was free of his fluid.

Rey was blushing deeply and her witch’s mark had begun to pulse again. Despite everything that had transpired between them during the night this was far the most intimate he’d been with her.

“You should…” she trailed off. She didn’t want him to go but she didn’t want to be selfish. They’d only just met and she couldn’t hope for him to declare his intentions so soon. 

“I know,” he said as he gathered her into his arms and lifted her up as he stood. Cradling her against his chest, Kylo walked to the cottage’s door and carried her over the threshold, “but I can’t bring myself to leave.”


	2. Chapter 2

Rey whimpered as she struggled to throw off the sheet that obscured her view of Kylo bent between her thighs. He’d woken her like this so often that she was still half asleep as his tongue snuck between her folds, her cunt already warm and wet in anticipation of his mouth.

“Too early,” she moaned, already forgiving him for rousing her before the first drips of dawn made their way through the curtains. His fingertips pressed heavily into her legs, spreading her even wider as he sucked her clit. She was naked and completely exposed like this, but she felt no shyness. They’d already shared every inch of their bodies, there was nothing left to hide.

“I need your cock inside me,” Rey pleaded as she tightened her fingers in his hair, attempting to pull him level.

Kylo stopped teasing her for a moment and lifted his head. His cheeks were flushed and his lips glistened as he said, “We haven’t the time.”

“We have all the time- Oh!” she gasped as he slipped a spit-soaked thumb in her hole and returned his tongue to its task. She started rocking desperately against him until she forgot all about his cock and could think of nothing but his mouth and his thick fingers. The brute strength and broad strokes of his blacksmithing were amateurish compared to the delicate, precise touch he plied to her now.

It was all too much, the edge too close. The last veil of slumber flew from her and she cried out her lover’s name. Her cunt clamped down and her thighs clapped over his ears as her whole body shook with her climax.

“Important day today. Mustn’t dawdle,” Kylo said with a smirk as he sat back on his heels and wiped his chin. Rey struggled to find her bearings while he stood up and dressed. The soft twitches of her cunt had barely subsided before he left the bedroom for the kitchen. Even after more than a year together, she still marveled at how quickly he could move from one task to the next while ignoring his hard cock that tented his pants. He was skilled in self-denial.

Rey climbed off the bed and wrapped her naked body in a blanket to ward against the chilled air before following him into the kitchen. She stoked the fire with a kindling spell that tinged the flames lilac as Kylo prepared their breakfast. She smiled to herself when she caught him casually spilling a bit of cooked egg onto the floor for Bumblebee. Her cat was still at times suspicious of Kylo but they’d come to an understanding once Kylo had started paying his respects with edible offerings.

When the food was ready, she joined him at the table. Distracted by the delightful aromas of a hot breakfast, she drank deeply from her mug then coughed and cocked her head. “Is this knotgrass?” she asked, perplexed.

“It is.”

“I appreciate you brewing tea,” she said as she rose from the table and poured out her drink into the pot of her yarrow plant. “But you do remember I don’t drink thistle for the flavor?” She’d explained this all to him before, her special tea she took with breakfast was a combination of herbs to stop her monthly blood and in turn stymie her fertility.

“Of course,” he said, “I just thought perhaps you would prefer a different tea for a while.” 

She blinked at him before replying, “Are you suggesting?”

“I am.”

Rey’s face erupted into a smile that bared all her teeth and lit up her eyes. Filling her mug once more with the knotgrass, she dropped onto his lap.

“Speak plainly now. You’re willing to chance it?” she asked, hope having already seized her heart. They’d had many tireless conversations on the subject of his curse, on whether it would still hold if he had a child with someone unattached to his familial tree. She had studied every spell book she owned, made offerings to the Horned God for guidance, and even journeyed to the far end of The Wilds to consult another witch. All to no avail. There was no answer, no guarantee their offspring wouldn’t be Alpha or omega.

Rey had been dogged in her reassurance. She was more than willing to raise a child that took after their father regardless of the complications. Yet each time the topic was raised, he had countered that the risk was too great and that they were a family regardless. And on that last point, she had agreed. She knew by now that she would never love another man as she loved Kylo. But as she had shared with him, she desperately wanted to be a mother, a mother as kind and as selfless as her godmother who had cared for her when her own parents would not. 

“Yes, Rey. I am willing. Surely our child will have the good sense to take after his mother. And if he is as I am, then that is a burden I will bear when the time comes.”

“We will bear it together, Kylo, whichever way our child grows. I love you,” she said softly before kissing him.

“I love you, too.”

The excitement of the decision had her deepening the kiss. She licked over his tongue, stealing his breath. There was a delightful, warm pressure from his lap against her bottom. Rey rocked her hips but Kylo hugged her tight to still her movements.

“I promised to help set up the spit for the feast and I have another important task to tend to before I see you again. You can have your fill of me tonight.”

“I can’t wait that long,” Rey pouted against his full lips. 

“If I knot you, I’ll be late.”

She defied his grip and slipped onto her knees before him. The blanket she’d been holding around herself fell from her shoulders to reveal her naked body.

“Fine then,” she said with a mischievous glint in her eye, “I’ll take you in my mouth.” She undid the front of his pants and licked her lips when his cock sprung forth, tall and proud. 

“I can’t get you pregnant like this,” Kylo teased which made Rey giggle but did nothing to dissuade her. She wanted to show him her love. Every waking moment of her life had become a manifestation of her feelings for him.

“There will be time for that this evening,” she said, “and all the evenings after.”

His cheeks pinked as she drew her tongue from the base of his cock to the tip. She could feel his pulse which danced in concert with her own as her renewed arousal quickened her heartbeat. 

“Oh, Rey,” he whimpered as she swallowed around him, hollowing her cheeks and gazing over his face. So much affection pooled in his dark eyes, she could see the warm smile there even when his mouth was hanging open in lust.

Rey bobbed over the head of his cock while her spit-slicked hand twisted along his shaft. His thigh muscles twitched and his breathing turned ragged; he was getting close. Her hand continued to work up and down as her mouth kissed the tip and she tongued his slit. With a primal shout, he shot hot streaks of come over her lips, neck and chest. 

His hands quivered as he pulled her back up, settling her onto his knees, keeping her weight clear of his lap. They kissed as his heart returned to it’s normal, less-eager rhythm. Finally, when he couldn’t delay any longer, he kissed her goodbye and left for the village.

Rey busied herself with her daily tasks until her excitement could not allow more delay. Kneeling before the heavy oak trunk that sat against the footboard of the bed, Rey clasped her hands and recited a simple incantation. The bronze lock popped open and she lifted the trunk’s lid. The top tray held an ancient spell book that was too delicate to display on the shelf with her other books. Setting the tray aside, Rey removed a few pieces of jewelry and then finally a black dress and a gauzy black shawl. Bumblebee slinked across the room to sniff at the fabric that by rights should have smelled of must but instead held the scent of cedar and wet ink.

“I never thought I would have cause to wear this, Bumblebee, nor to sew my name,” Rey said as she ran her fingers over all the names of witches embroidered in dark thread around the hem of the skirt.

Bumblebee meowed and rubbed his head happily against her leg as she stitched ‘Rey’ just after her godmother’s name. She paused for the length of one breath before setting down her needle. The name her father had shared with her mother, the same name that had once concluded her own identity, did not belong. She would not be bound to them by even a slender thread, not even one that could be plucked free. Here on this dress, that maybe her own daughter might wear someday, she would only be known as Rey and nothing more.

Pushing away the dark clouds of memory, she turned her thoughts to Kylo. Despite his own difficult past, he had found a balance within himself. He was rational but passionate, strong but vulnerable. Rey instinctively understood the power of his dichotomies as such contradictions were required when performing magic. She could not conjure fire without the presence of water nor could she compel the wind without being rooted in soil. She and Kylo defied the laws of nature in their own ways while anchored by a type of symmetry. She was sorcery to the commonplace just as he was Alpha to omega. They might not be two halves of the same whole but they were two halves that would undoubtedly forge something new.

She wanted nothing more than to pursue that future with Kylo which meant she needed to leave soon. She bathed and then braided her hair in a crown before slipping on the dress. It was nothing like the fashion of the day. The fabric flowed easily down her unbound bust before spreading into a graceful skirt that swayed with the slightest breeze. Without a corset or even buttons along the front, her sternum was visible, her witch’s mark beautifully framed. But the mark was only to be seen by lovers so Rey took the shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders, covering her chest until the time was right.

After adding a few pins tipped with amber as finishing touches to her hair, Rey grabbed a dark cloak to waylay the crisp cold that would come once the sun set. As an afterthought, she wove some errant sprigs of knotgrass into her braid. Kylo so favored the scent of the grass she was always laying cuttings around the cottage. She bowed low to kiss Bumblebee on the head, whispering her love in his ear. Looking around her little cottage now, she wondered if the simple structure would feel different after tonight, if she would feel any different as well. With a basket of wheat bouquets hooked over her elbow and a heady excitement in her heart, Rey took her leave.

The celebration of the autumnal equinox was well underway by the time Rey entered the village green. She passed out the wheat bouquets more quickly than normal and offered blessings to everyone who crossed her path regardless of whether they gave her any coins. She was overflowing with delight. 

“I have no coin to offer you,” said a familiar voice behind her.

“Then you must give me no less than your heart,” she replied, leaning back against a sturdy torso as strong arms wrapped around her, “but I must warn you I have no bouquets left to bestow.”

“Then I will simply have to claim your heart in return for my own,” Kylo said as he kissed the top of her head. They watched as the villagers gathered around. Long tables laden with the year’s harvest stretched out like spokes of a wheel extending from the great pile of firewood that had yet to be lit.

“I’m famished,” Kylo said as he dropped his arms from her shoulders and took her hand instead. He led the way to two seats at a table heaped with cooked meats, sweet fruits and pies. Other villagers began to fill in the open places on the bench on either side of them and they joined in the easy chatter and merriment of the holiday. Even when they were turned in opposite directions and engaged in conversation with their neighbors, they touched. Kylo’s hand rested on her thigh as Rey’s fingertips idly stroked his knuckles.

Rey always enjoyed the seasonal gatherings but the deference shown to her on sacred days was also a bittersweet reminder that she was an aberration. To be both celebrated and feared was her lot as a witch; she would always be separate. But with Kylo by her side, she was not alone. They were united in their otherness. Not during the short years with her parents nor the extraordinary decade with her godmother had she ever known such a sense of belonging. He was her four walls and her thatched roof. He was her hearth.

The bonfire was still brightening the dark sky when they agreed to slip away, the cheery voices of the villagers fading with each step. They walked without speaking, hands clasped tightly, pausing every now and then to kiss.

They were deep within the wood that encircled her cottage when Kylo stopped and turned to her. “We’re almost there,” he said and pulled from his pocket a thick strip of white cloth. “I want it to be a surprise.”

Rey turned so he could tie the cloth about her eyes, fully obscuring her vision. “I love you so much,” she whispered as the knot tightened behind her head. 

“I love you,” Kylo whispered back before his lips danced over hers. Then taking her hand and pulling her close, he led her slowly onward. It wasn’t long before he paused again, removed her cloak, and picked her up in his arms. He carried her over some sort of barrier that lifted his knees before setting her back on her feet.

“Just here,” he said finally, dropping her hand, “one moment.” 

Rey listened carefully. The forest was as lively as ever even in the night. A barn owl hooted a few paces away and the velvety wisps of bat wings flitted over her head. Mixed within the forest’s sermon was the familiar scrape of Kylo’s flint. He insisted on using his own tool even when she could easily conjure a flame herself; she found it charming. 

“Are you ready?” Kylo asked quietly, his voice was soft and nervous.

“Yes,” she said and bent her head forward for him to undo the fabric held round her eyes. 

“Oh my! Kylo!” she gasped. They were standing in a small clearing and in the center of a great metalwork circle that was laid on the ground. The top ridge of the metal formed a trough from which a brilliant white flame burned all around them. The light was both eerie and alluring.

“How?” Rey asked as she stared at the peculiar blaze that encircled them.

“Some salt colors fire white,” Kylo offered.

“Are you sure you haven’t cast a spell?” 

Kylo laughed and shook his head. “You possess enough magic for the both of us. This is merely a blacksmith’s trick.”

“Yet isn’t that some kind of magic in and of itself? A blacksmith that can enchant a witch?”

“Perhaps,” he said before glancing up at the moonlight that crept through the tree branches overhead. “I believe it’s time.”

With trembling fingers, she lifted the gauzy shawl from her chest and draped it over her hair. Her witch’s mark betrayed the pounding of her heart. Kylo was watching her intently; a soft gleam of tears shone in his eyes. She quickly wiped at her own eyes before procuring a gold cord from a hidden pocket in her skirt. She draped the cord over their crossed wrists, after which they joined hands. Kylo cleared his throat and then, at a nod of Rey’s head, they recited together-

_“I take thee as I witness thy love_  
_Fasten me to thy mortal flesh_  
_I bind mine whole heart to thee alone_  
_With this twine our two souls enmesh”_

The gold cord, now possessed by Rey’s magic, tied tightly over their wrists lashing their hands together, signifying their marriage. 

Kylo bent to kiss her. The soft caress of their lips devolved into a hot hunger. With their hands still tightly bound together, they managed to drop down onto the ground within the glowing white circle of flames. Kylo laid on his back as Rey straddled his hips. The cord fastening their hands together made it difficult, but they succeeded in undoing his pants underneath her splayed skirt.

Rey’s wet cunt slipped smoothly over the head of Kylo’s cock. Not yet dropping her whole weight to the base of his shaft, she just teased him with short dips. He groaned impatiently but he couldn’t take hold of her waist to sheath himself completely within her. He just had to lay there and wait for her to give him what he so clearly wanted, which was every inch of her. She didn’t keep him waiting long, her own desire was too great. Rey slithered over his cock until he bottomed out within her, the slight pang making her ache for more. Wherever they touched each other, the cord forced their hands to move as one. Kylo teased her nipples as her own fingers caressed her breasts. Twice his cock slipped all the way out of her and she guided him back in, his knuckles skating through her folds.

The hot pressure of her pleasure was quickly building when she lost all patience and began riding him with abandon. As her pace increased, she had to place their hands on his chest so she could lift and drop herself over him again and again. 

“Let me touch you,” Kylo moaned. The soft glow of her witch’s mark illuminated distressed lines drawn across his face. He so clearly wished to tease her bud but he couldn’t indulge that desire with her hands anchoring her on his chest.

Rey shook her head and a few tendrils of hair sprung free and tiny knotgrass flowers fluttered from her braided crown. With her hands firmly placed over Kylo’s heart, she arched her back, her face to the sky. The owl had flown off, spooked by their moans, but the cloud of bats swooped in great arcs overhead. In a whisper only she could hear, she recited the ancient incantation of her people in a language lost to time. 

The aged trees above them bent backwards as easily as if they were saplings, displaying the open sky above. The moon burned brightly, its ivory beams falling unobstructed across their conjoined bodies, setting them aglow. The light bestowed it’s blessing on their union and Rey, overcome by Kylo’s body below her and the magic of the universe above, yielded to her release.

And just like that, the gold twine that was tied around their wrists blistered white hot. Kylo yelped and Rey bit the inside of her cheek against the pain. The burning cord branded their flesh before recasting into cold water that soothed the angry red skin. Her orgasm had consummated their union in the oldest of witchcraft rites.

“We are bound fast for eternity,” Rey said through ragged breaths as she moved her now freed hands to cup Kylo’s face and kiss him. She loved him more than anything and had never doubted that he returned the favor tenfold. But there was a profound reassurance now that the universe’s blessing of their union was forever scarred on their skin.

Holding her tight, Kylo rolled them until she was underneath him. “Mine, only mine, my wife, my witch,” he chanted and pounded into her harder than he’d ever done before. She gripped his shoulders with all her strength and wrapped her legs tightly over the small of his back.

“Do it now!” Rey cried as she tilted her head and bared her neck to him. And just like that, he heeded her command and sunk his teeth into her neck, marking her as his. Two vastly different rituals, both with permanent symbols of their devotion to one another emblazoned on their bodies.

As blood from her wound trickled into Kylo’s mouth and his knot swelled within her cunt, her mind cleaved from her body. It was too much. She screamed her pleasure as his body pushed hers to the limit, two bodies that were never meant to accommodate each other, yet still somehow coalesced. 

Kylo held her hips and kissed her brow, encouraging her to relax around him. Rey, for her part, ran her fingers through his hair, reassuring him she wouldn’t break even under the immense pressure of his cock and his come that filled her. 

“Wife,” Kylo whispered the word against her ear. The sound of it in his mouth more real than the brand on her wrists or even the teeth marks on her neck.

“Husband,” she replied. 

They walked back to their cottage with arms around each other, swaying, drunk on happiness. When they reached the front door, Rey pulled Kylo into a kiss. 

“Shall I carry my bride over the threshold?” Kylo asked as he traced a lock of her hair that curled across her brow. A single white petal stuck to his fingertip.

She realized then that while their relationship had just gone through an important transformation, the seed of all this had been planted many months ago.

“I was yours when you carried me inside after the first night we laid together,” she said. Her cottage had become _their home together_ all the way back then. It would feel no different now, just the same easy comfort of four-walls that housed her and her lover. Nor would she be any different as his wife. She was still the same Rey who fell for Kylo Ren when he, faced with a pitiful stranger, had done his best to help.

He kissed her again and she lingered against his lips. The smell of his sweat and her blood was entwined with the rich aroma of soil; she committed it all to memory.

“Go on inside and wait for me. I must make an offering to the Spirit Coven,” she said lowering her eyes so Kylo couldn’t catch the variation of the truth she was telling.

“May I accompany you?”

“No,” she said gently, “I won’t be long.” That bit was fully truth. She would no sooner stay away from him than forsake her magic. 

Kylo nodded and then entered the cottage, leaving her alone. Rey turned and headed towards the trees on the far side of the clearing from where they’d consummated their handfasting. She walked along a path so narrow and twisted that it would be mistaken as a rabbit trail to any eyes but her own. The woods closed around her, brush covering her tracks, consuming her completely. Finally, she stopped just before the Hawthorn tree that rose up unexpectantly within the grove of beeches. 

She knelt, brushing away the leaves that covered the obsidian stone tucked in the Hawthorn’s roots. The two carved lines that divided the circular stone into four equal parts were barely visible in the moonlight. Rey ran her fingernail through the grooves, clearing them of debris. She had only consulted the Spirit Coven twice before. Once, in a moment of grief just after her godmother had passed. She had received the answer she was looking for then- that she was not alone. And once, after Kylo had proposed; the blessing she’d sought had been keenly bestowed. But now, as she reached into the pocket that before had held her handfasting cord and removed a small leather bag, she was not sure of what answer her question would garner.

From within the bag Rey drew a handful of sun-whitened, raven bones. Pressing them to her witch’s mark, she breathed deep and cleared her mind.

“Spirit Coven, answer me, during this sacred time when light and dark are in perfect balance. If I bear the child of my mate, will it be wolf or witch?”

Rey tossed the bones onto the stone. With a small flame conjured between her middle finger and thumb, she bent low to read the scattered bits of skeleton. She squinted. That couldn’t be right. She spit lightly at the fire held between her fingers to brighten the blaze. She looked again. Her toss was all mixed up, nothing was where it should have been. 

Evil laid alongside love while the king and queen were as far apart as possible, each teetering on opposite edges of the stone. The bone that represented family, the one that was most important to this reading, had broken in four parts.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys. I just want to warn you that this chapter includes a bawdy song about bestiality... And I'm disgustingly proud of it.

“Stay a little longer,” Rey whispered in the stillness. 

It was just before dawn. Kylo stood at the foot of the bed already clothed. She’d felt him wake an hour ago; his breaths having moved from soft to steady. They’d simply laid there with their backs to each other, staring out into separate spaces.

It was the earliest days of Spring, one of the busiest times for a blacksmith. The villagers all needed new or sharpened tools for their fields. But Rey well understood that it wasn’t just the rigor of the season that had him anxious to slip away without waking her. It was the heavy darkness that had settled over him, thickening with each day that had passed since they’d married.

“Running off won’t solve anything,” she said. He flinched at her words and she regretted speaking. She hadn’t intended to wound him but the quiet had been killing her. 

“What if we can’t…” His words drifted off but she heard the rest of his thought; he’d voiced this fear before, in pained mutterings in his sleep. _What if we can’t conceive because I am a monster?_

Rey knelt up in the bed and lunged towards him, grabbing him tightly around his waist, laying her forehead along the hard ridge of his spine. 

“I love you, Kylo. Whatever is to be will be.”

The weighty pause that followed would have upset her if she harbored even the slightest doubt of his ardent love.

“I just want to make you happy,” he said.

“You do! These things just take time,” she reminded him as she had done so often before, “And if it takes more than time, we’ll sort it.”

Kylo turned around and kissed her, but there was a reticence in him that he couldn’t hide. “I’ll be home late tonight. Not until after dark.”

“I’ll be waiting,” she said and let him go.

The imprint he’d left on his side of the bed was still warm and Rey rolled into it, pressing her face so hard against the mattress that she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to scream. She was as angry as he was sad. Each month when her blood came, Kylo closed further in upon himself. He wanted to yoke blame to his neck when there was no fault to be found. She couldn’t keep insisting that she loved him, curse and all. He needed to believe it.

When she could not in good conscience linger any longer in bed, she rose and set to her day. The acidity of her mood slowly dissipating as she ate her breakfast and made her way out to her garden. It had been a cool spring so far but Rey was finding the morning to be warming nicely as she attended to her routine while Bumblebee lazed in the burgeoning sunlight. 

The damp earth yielded easily into small divots each time she pursed her lips and blew a short puff of air at the ground. She then dropped the seeds into their beds as the impish red squirrels chattered among themselves, watching her attentively from the trees.

Her mind kept returning to Kylo and the tension between them, to all the things said and unsaid about their bodily differences and what that might mean for their chance at having children. But she’d run in these circles too many times before and she was done being dizzy. To drown out the noise of her own thoughts Rey hummed a flurry of notes before settling into a ballad she’d once heard performed by a roving bard. Soon enough she found herself singing aloud the words that buzzed between her lips.

_“With a rattle made of poppy, a maiden charmed a snake,_  
_but when he coiled round her hips, she did begin to quake._

_With a horsewhip made of heather, a maiden broke a roan,_  
_but when he nuzzled midst her legs, she quivered as she moaned._

_With an arrow made of primrose, a maiden speared a boar,_  
_but when he rutted on her lap, she begged for more and more._

_With a shackle made of daisies, a maiden trapped a beast,_  
_but when he took her as his mate, her hunting trips did cease.”_

As the final verse rang out, she couldn’t help but laugh. “Of course,” she said to Bumblebee who had deserted his nap and was now stalking a grasshopper, “That would be the song my mind chose without thinking. Perhaps I should try to tame Kylo with flowers? What do you think? I suspect a dagger made of knotgrass would do the trick.”

Bumblebee eyed her skeptically as the tiny grasshopper legs that protruded from his mouth thrashed and then stilled. 

“Or perhaps some animals can never be fully tamed,” she said as she laughed again and scratched his fuzzy chin. A true lightness was returning to her as she wiled away her time in her garden with her cat. The rich soil under her, the sharp blue sky above, the life that pulsed off each living thing was a panacea. Bit by bit, Gaia sweetened the last of her sourness.

She worked late into the day, gardening feverishly until sweat was streaming down her back. The sun was low in the sky before she even considered quitting. Her energy felt limitless. She’d forsaken a break at midday to eat as she didn’t have much appetite and even now supper held no appeal. She was only abandoning her work because the seeds were all planted and the garden was completely free of weeds.

Back in the cottage, she set to cleaning even though not much needed doing. Kylo kept their home nearly spotless. After rearranging her herbs in reverse alphabetical order, she stared at the cupboard. There wasn’t even a meal to prepare for Kylo to keep her occupied as he would take his supper in the village. Her cotton work dress was too heavy so she stripped it off and slipped on a nightdress. She found herself pacing in front of the flameless hearth, her hands flitting about. Bumblebee, annoyed by her energy, had hopped down from his perch on the windowsill and retreated to the bedroom.

If only Kylo weren’t going to be back so late. She wasn’t expecting him for at least two more hours if not three. The thought of Kylo, bent low over his forge stirred her desire. His muscles flexing with each movement, sweat pouring down his chest and then dripping down his abdomen. He moved through her imagination, closer and closer, appearing most vividly now, naked and pinning her against the wall, his hands holding her wrists above her head as he bucked between her thighs.

The fantasy was so clear she could taste his skin, feel his hands restraining her, his cock plunging into her cunt. A gush of arousal pulsed from between her folds. Rey lifted the skirt of her nightdress and was taken aback at the amount of fluid that was dripping down her legs. It hadn’t been that long since she’d had sex, she thought, as she let her skirt fall back down and grabbed a pail. She would just need to take a bath and relax. Maybe she would even get a head start and relieve some of the pressure growing within her; Kylo wouldn’t mind.

The moment she exited the cottage her determination to bathe vanished. She dropped the pail and walked out into a sea of knotgrass shoots that tickled her ankles. The rain the day before had lured the weed from hibernation. The scent of it was suddenly overpowering, like she’d never smelled anything so unequivocally fresh before. Rey gasped, pulling the odor deep into the back of her throat.

The sun was just below the tree line. At this time of year that meant that the temperature went from chilled to cold, but Rey was burning up. She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead to check for a fever; every inch of her was hot. She should retreat back into the cottage, seek out a medicinal spell and lie on the bed. A fever could be dangerous. But instead she found herself wrenching off her night dress, baring every inch of her skin to the air.

The light was low and her witch’s mark was beaming a brilliant, steady red. The mark did change colors but always lighter hues. Red had never presented before and Rey was now frightened. She fell to her knees and cried out. There was no one else who lived in this stretch of The Wilds close enough to hear her but she felt the need to vocalize her fear all the same. 

Like flipping the pages of a well-worn book, she racked her brain for some charm that could ease her fever or soothe the ache that was now welling up in her abdomen. But no solution, spell or otherwise, came to mind. She needed help. With a clawed hand, she scraped at the dirt and then laid a clod to her lips and swallowed.

_"From lungs to tongue, Draw air to ear_  
_These words unsung, My love must hear-_  
_‘Come home, Kylo, I am unwell.’"_

Her chest contracted, crushing out every last wisp of her breath as her mouth opened and closed silently. She suffocated for a horridly long moment before a whimper cracked free. With her discarded nightdress, she wiped first the spit that had gathered in the corners of her mouth and then the dirt coughed up from her throat. Bending low to the ground, her breaths came ragged but steady. 

Without premeditation, she began to crawl in a circle, her fists clenching at the only things within reach- the knotgrass. She ripped clumps of it from the ground and flattened swaths as well. Her muscles were vibrating as she built the gnarled weed into a ring around her. The ache of arousal she’d felt between her thighs was now intensifying to a painful searing. Wetness continued to pour down her legs in sticky rivulets. Twice she ran her fingers through it to make certain it wasn’t blood.

A shout tore her from her madness and she found the strength to stand. Kylo was running towards her. The pack he normally carried was nowhere to be seen and there was a heavy flush of exertion on his cheeks and neck.

“Rey!” he hollered as he neared her, reaching out to her and pulling her into his arms. The last red tendrils of the setting sun illuminated his wild, dark eyes.

“I thought I heard you whispering from the bellows,” he said through panting breaths, “so I came and when I reached the stream, I caught your scent.” 

“Scent? Kylo, I don’t know what is happening,” she cried as she pressed her face to his chest that was rising and falling rapidly with his exhausted breaths. His arms held her tight and Rey couldn’t help but press her body flat against him. The feel of his heavy muscles, the warmth of his body and the smell of his sweat were comforting. She needed him, needed him as close as only two lovers could be. Her cunt clenched at just the thought of his cock.

“I’m here, sweetheart. We’ll sort this.” His tone was reassuring but she read the worry written in the tight lines across his forehead and around his lips.

His placating words and his proximity eased her anxiety but they did nothing to pacify the need that throbbed in her groin. Her hands slithered under his shirt as her hips bucked against his thighs. His body responded immediately, his cock swelling until it prodded her belly.

“Please!” She didn’t know what was wrong with her, none of this made sense but she knew instinctively that she needed Kylo inside her, that only his cock in her cunt could keep the fever at bay.

He placed his hands on either side of her head and kissed her. He was shivering as Rey began to strip away his clothes, she shook as well.

“I’m scared,” she said as Kylo knelt in the center of the haphazard nest-like arrangement she’d made and pulled her down with him.

“It’s alright,” he said as he nuzzled her neck, “You’re in heat, sweetheart. I’ll take care of you.”

And before Rey could process his words, he’d turned her over onto her hands and knees, and pressed his face into the cleft of her ass. The hot puff of his breath on her exposed flesh took her by surprise and she tried to squirm away but he held her tight as he inhaled again.

Straightening back up, he placed his hands on her hips and pressed his cock against her opening. Her body, however, refused to give way. Rey pushed back against him but still her cunt wouldn’t unclench to allow him entry.

“Relax,” he said as he bent over her back, his arms bracketing her own; they were both positioned on all fours now, Kylo’s large frame eclipsing hers. With a hearty snap of his hips he breached her and she screamed. Her body tightened hard around his sharp intrusion; yet the immense pain was ribboned with pleasure.

“Don’t fight,” he said, kissing her cheek. “Don’t fight. It’s what you need.”

She willed her body to loosen, to relax around his girth but every muscle below her heart was clamping. Her stomach, her ass, her legs were all as tight as her cunt that crushed down around his cock.

Kylo’s hips rocked into her with difficulty until she didn’t so much as relax but adjust to his intrusion. Her inner walls barely allowed his movement but the faster he rutted into her the less frightened she felt. 

“Harder,” she moaned and flailed a hand backwards to pull at his hip; he complied.

“I need your knot,” she cried out. The words spilled from her mouth without deliberation. There was no thought of her neglected clit or of where his fingers and lips could be plied. The other touches of their skin, their hands and their mouths barely registered. Both her body and mind chased a singular purpose- to be knotted.

Kylo grunted and nipped at the side of her throat, his hips pressing so roughly against her bottom that her arms and legs nearly buckled. His inflating knot elicited not the usual heady mix of panic and pleasure at being stuck on his cock but instead an eerie calm. When his knot was completely engorged there began the peculiar sensation of her inner walls contracting in waves. Her muscles undulated on their own, milking his cock, drawing his come deeper. Kylo’s whole body was trembling now and a low rumble emanated from his chest like the purr of a giant cat.

Carefully, he turned them on their sides, pillowing Rey’s head with his outstretched arm. “Try to get some sleep,” he said as his other arm draped over her waist and held her.

“I’m not tired.” She found it absurd that after the terror of her sudden sickness and then the ferocity of their sex that she’d be able to sleep. But then her eyelids succumbed to their own weight and the scratchy knotgrass and hard packed dirt below her became unbelievably soft.

Rey dreamt of a wolf as big as a man, its fur black as coal. With lips curled back from its knife-like teeth, it snarled. Terrified, she tried to run but her legs had no strength and she fell. The wolf leapt at her as she attempted to scramble away on all fours. The hot weight of its chest connected with her back, knocking the wind from her lungs. She turned her head and out of the corner of her vision she caught sight of its eye and she whimpered.

A loud squelch woke her. Kylo was sliding his deflated knot from her cunt. She scrubbed at her eyes and turned to him.

“I dreamt of you as a wolf,” she murmured, still too sleep drunk to censor herself.

“Then you dreamt of me as I am,” Kylo replied. His voice was rough and his eyes were wild with fat pupils eclipsing the warm brown of his irises. They were exactly as the wolf’s eye had been and she shivered.

“You said that I was in heat?” 

Kylo nodded but his gaze dropped from her face to her cunt where his come was seeping out of her. His fingers moved between her legs and began pushing the warm fluid back inside. The moment his fingers penetrated her the fierce throbbing of her cunt and the fever reignited. Rey keened at the sensation.

“You feel that? That desperation boiling your blood? The only thing that can ease it is my cock.” A tinge of revulsion snuck through the hot rush of his words. He put his hand on her hip and maneuvered her onto her belly.

She didn’t believe him. She couldn’t fathom how this was possible, that her body was acting as if she were omega. Yet she disregarded her own inner protest and lifted her bottom so he could more easily mount her. Her cunt was as tense as the last time but she’d learned from the earlier struggle and forced herself back over him without hesitation. She took the pain of his intrusion with gritted teeth but as soon as her body enveloped his, there was a flash of relief.

“Why is this happening?” 

“I don’t know, sweetheart” he said and he sounded devastated. Yet a moment later she’d all but forgotten his melancholic response. Everything else faded as the boundless need to be filled by her Alpha’s knot and stuffed with his come overtook the last bit of her brain. They writhed against each other, her ass slamming back against his hips with each thrust until he fulfilled his obligation as her mate and knotted her again. 

Once more the post-coitus languor overtook her and she dozed with Kylo pulsing inside her and her cunt milking his come. Again she was woken by him pulling out, only this time he knelt between her legs, cleaning her cleft with his tongue. The licks didn’t thrill her like his mouth usually did but it mollified her for a minute.

Over and over again they repeated these steps, sex and then rest and then sex again. Each time Kylo’s knot swelled inside her she felt calm and each time it softened she was lost to panicked lust until he mounted her. Twice more the moon rose and fell. She would have lost all sense of time if they’d been inside the cottage. She felt no pangs of hunger except for Kylo’s flesh and her thirst was all but gone. She wanted nothing but to stay bent over, her bottom raised in the air, begging Kylo to take her. 

At the end of the third day, Kylo disengaged their bodies and her reckless lust failed to rise again. A bone aching fatigue took her and her stomach began to growl. Without a word, he lifted her and helped her to the stream where he washed them both in the cool water before carrying her home. He cooked a thick stew and fed her as she laid in bed. Two jugs of water, first drained and then promptly refilled, were set on the bedside table. An unspoken truce to ignore their concerns about her heat was upheld as they both fell into a sated sleep.

Rey was staring into her tea, beguiled by the leaves as a persistent rain rustled the thatch roof of the cottage. She had no talent for reading her fortune at the bottom of a cup yet she couldn’t help but wonder what secrets the dregs of knotgrass held. But it wasn’t her future that vexed her that night so much as her past.

She’d been alone for the last week, Kylo had been sleeping at the forge to catch up on the work he’d missed during her heat and the two days after when she’d just laid in bed and wept. There hadn’t been any words then between them then, Rey lost in her own fears and Kylo in his. The overpowering pleasure of her heat and Kylo’s instinctual response had faded with the fever and left only concern for what it all meant.

The sound of the rain crescendoed suddenly as the cottage door opened. Kylo hurried inside, soaked. 

“The skies will be cleared by morning. You could have stayed away one more night,” she said as he toed off his muddy boots and set them aside.

Kylo shook his head like a dog drying wet fur, scattering droplets in an arc. “I missed you too much,” he said as he moved in front of the hearth and the fire burning there. He stripped off his sodden clothing and draped it over the mantel to dry. He stood still for a few moments as the flames wicked the water from his skin and disappeared it into the air.

He was so beautiful naked. She’d never seen a finer man. His broad shoulders and the thick muscles of his back that gave way to the curve of his ass and then his long legs. He turned just then and still her view improved. She was reminded of how much pleasure and comfort he was capable of despite the curse that cast him as a monster. His cock hanging softly between his legs gave no indication in this state that he was not all man. Nor did she, she realized then, even with the twinge of arousal she felt from her husband’s nakedness, provide any hint that perhaps she was not all witch.

“How?” Rey asked, starting in the middle of a conversation they’d only begun to circle.

“I don’t know,” he answered, catching her meaning as he so often did without needing her to elaborate. They hadn’t found the energy for this discussion since the fever broke and then he’d been away. For her, however, it had already half unraveled.

“I’m not omega.” A crack of far off thunder punctuated her proclamation.

“Your body behaved like one,” he answered quietly without any trace of combativeness over being challenged. There was a stillness that followed as his words spun round and round between her ears. An endless list of reasons why he could be wrong about this stacked up on her tongue but before they could spill from her lips he added. “And you smell like one now.”

Rey balked at that. “How do I smell?”

“Like lavender and soot and open skies. Like you belong to me,” he said as if that somehow made perfect sense, “And now like dust settled by rain. All omegas have a similar earthy note. You didn’t have that until your heat. It was part of what beckoned me home, not just your spell.”

She stood and approached Kylo and pressed her nose to his armpit, breathing in the familiar musk that was equal parts sweat and skin and charred iron. “You smell the same,” she said.

“I’m the only Alpha you’ve met. There’s a metallic odor we share.”

She nodded as she returned to the chair she’d just vacated. She would have to accept his authority on the subject; he recognized her condition, knew this part of her in ways she never would. She understood more than most that there were times when one must accept another’s knowledge and not fight it. His certainty had settled any doubt that she was now omega but there were darker and deeper queries still at hand. 

“My parents,” she said unfeelingly, “I was so young. I know next to nothing about them.”

Kylo shook his head. “You’re not of my blood. My family keeps meticulous records. If even one member of our clan had left Farrows I would know. I was the first of my kin to even cross the Nebula Sea.”

Again he had an answer she could accept without much resistance yet her stomach still roiled with worry. 

“If I am omega but my family did not share in your curse, then why?” she asked. The storm outside was drawing nearer, and the wind was picking up. A damp draft stole through the crack beneath the door and batted at the fire, fattening the flames that filled the hearth.

“Are you certain,” Kylo began as he waded into the waters where she was already swimming, “there is no type of magic that could have changed you?”

“I didn’t even know what omega meant beyond some storybook before I met you. How could I have cast a spell to change my body?” 

“I don’t know.” The repetition of that refrain was tiresome. The conversation had met the impasse she had predicted, Kylo did not know how she had transformed or why. She covered her face with her hands and drew a compressed breath from along her palms. She wasn’t distraught like she had been the two days post-heat when lust’s absence had left her hollow only to be filled by an anxious fear that her body was no longer her own. She was just frustrated now; she did not like not knowing.

Kylo walked over to her and cupped the nape of her neck with his hand, his thumb stroking along the white scars from where his teeth had marked her. His touch instantly soothed her as his other hand slid down the front of her dress. The laces that cinched her bodice loosened with the movement of his wrist as his fingers gently massaged her breast. He planted a kiss on the crown of her head before retreating into the bedroom. She understood the gentle touches as an invitation but not an all-out request for intimacy if she were ready.

She wanted to follow him, to lay with him while not in heat but the mystery still vexed her brain and kept her planted on her chair. She drained the last of her tea and listened to the clatter of the storm rolling ever closer. Glancing at the shelf that held her spell books, she wondered not for the first time if there was a spell that could elucidate how this had all happened, some sort of clarity charm.

The memory came to her then, Kylo standing at her shoulder, the creak of the dry leather binding as she’d opened the book. They’d been discussing the effect of knotgrass on heartbreak but then there’d been that other bit. Those few lines in her godmother’s tidy script-

__

_‘At the poise of night and day, beneath the white skies. The first in true love must fall, for the last to rise.’_

What if there wasn’t a spell to explain how she’d transformed but instead it was actually a spell that had done it? If ‘first’ were altered to its more archaic form ‘Alpha’, and then the same translator’s touch applied to ‘last’ it would read- ‘Alpha in true love must fall, for omega to rise.’ 

Kylo was deeply, undeniably in love with her and hadn’t she risen as omega? Was it possible, as Kylo had suggested, that she’d been changed by her own magic? 

She hurried to the shelf and snatched the spell book, opening it to the right page. She read the lines again and again trying to parse out some other meaning than the one that now, deep down, she knew to be the truth.

“Kylo!” she shouted, her voice competing with the thunderclaps that were closing in.

“Rey?” he called back as he emerged from the bedroom still mostly unclothed except for a pair of dry pants that barely clung to his hips and were wide open in the front.

“I wore knotgrass in my hair,” she choked out, she was feeling faint.

“What are you talking about?”

“The night of our handfasting, I wore knotgrass in my hair. I know how much you love the smell of it and it was a nod to our first night together. I was being clever.”

His knuckles glanced over her cheek and then he kissed her brow, “I remember,” he said, his voice placating as if she were conveying an emotion rather than a theory.

Rey shook her head with frustration. She pushed the spell book into his hands as she explained the substitutions that could be made.

Kylo stared at her blankly and then ran a hand through his hair. “The first part, what does that say again?” he asked. His expression was drawn and his eyes were flickering between the page and her face, unsure which would bring him clarity first. 

_“’At the poise of night and day, beneath the white skies,’”_ she recited from memory, noticing how the two deep grooves between his eyebrows betrayed his concentration.

“Poise is equilibrium,” Kylo said, “The equinox is when the night lasts exactly as long as the day. That could be the poise, could it not?”

“Yes,” Rey said, the din of the storm was settled directly overhead and no longer moving west, “And the white skies would have been fulfilled by the full moon and perhaps even aided by the white flames you lit. Kylo, I wore knotgrass in my hair. My godmother had penned this spell on the same page as the knotgrass remedy for a broken heart.”

A minute of silence passed while Kylo closed his eyes. She’d already solved it, there could be no other explanation for her transformation but she wanted him to confirm her conclusion on his own. The tempest battering their tiny cottage was an all too apt reminder that they, whether Alpha or omega and witch, were still mere mortals. A spell like this, wielded without knowing, was the territory of fate.

“Did you know?” he finally asked. There was no accusation in his voice nor trace of disbelief, merely confusion.

“No.”

“But you couldn’t have cast a spell by accident? It can’t be that easy.”

“No, all magic requires one final ingredient, one that prevents such coincidences. Desire.”

Kylo frowned at her, his disbelief plain across his face.

“Desire was present,” she said, “That night and all those after, I wanted nothing more than to be your mate, to bear your child. The spell created a path and I walked down it by my own will.”

“This spell, your magic, made you omega?”

“Yes,” Rey said, her body was trembling, “As did your love.”

He pulled her into his arms, his lips brushing against her hair as he spoke. “When you were in heat, I thought that I had done this to you somehow. I loathed myself as I loved you. I was torn apart.”

“I know. But I wanted this, Kylo, even if I didn’t know it in my mind it was in my heart.”

“My whole life I saw my curse as my destiny and it was one that I did not want. I vowed to never have a mate, omega or otherwise. Then I met you, Rey. You changed everything.”

Rey grabbed at his waist and pulled him into a kiss, her tongue slipping into his mouth as her hand stole through the open flap of his pants. The stillness in him shattered as she wrapped her hand around his cock and began to stroke him. Kylo’s lips moved from her own to her neck as he fully unlaced the front of her dress. She continued to coax his erection fuller, her fingertips smearing the beginning drops of his come over the head.

He bent her back across the table, laying her out like a feast just for him. His mouth trailed from her neck to her breasts, sucking her nipples until they pebbled between his lips. She moaned as she continued to rub his cock, reveling in the velvety texture of his skin.

“Are you alright?” Kylo asked, lifting his head from her chest.

“Don’t stop,” she begged already lamenting the absence of his warm, wet mouth on her flesh.

“Rey, are you sure? Your witch’s mark…”

She looked down at her chest and the world stopped short. Her mark had gone an opalescent grey and was fluttering rapidly.

Kylo laid his fingers on her throat along her pulse. 

“It’s not my heartbeat,” she said as her thoughts coalesced like a potion rightly brewed.

“I thought it usually-”

“Yes but it’s not mine. Someone else’s heartbeat has just come into being.”

Kylo stared back at her in confusion. Slowly his eyebrows unfolded and raised up in shock and then delight. 

“Are you saying?” His whole body was trembling now as he gaped at her.

“I am.”

He kissed her mouth and then her mark, every ounce of his joy conveyed by his lips.

He pulled back and stared at her in wonder. “It’s beating so fast,” he said cautiously as he studied the frenetic flickering, “are you sure that everything is alright?”

Rey smiled and watched him closely as she spoke, she didn’t want to miss any of the emotions that were about to take hold of him. “It’s so fast because it’s beating twice. One for each child.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It wouldn’t be a Star Wars story without twins, right? 
> 
> I’m thinking about inserting a shorter, PWP chapter with just pregnancy sex or lactation kink… Any interest?


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PWP stands for _Porn with Poetry_ , right? Right??

A stripe of skin from her collarbones to her cunt, two inches wide, was bare. The robe she’d taken to wearing to bed hadn’t grown apace with her the last few weeks. The sash, tied high over her heavy belly, was unable to close the panels. She would have abandoned it entirely, but it was too cold this close to winter and the fire too far from the bed. Even Kylo’s body couldn’t keep her fully heated.

Rey opened the cottage door to peer out into the night that was spitting sharp, dry flakes of snow. The cold air pricked the backs of her arms and dared her teeth to chatter.

“Kylo?” she called and as if he’d been conjured, her husband appeared from the dark.

“You’ll freeze,” he said, herding her back inside. He was carrying a pail of water fresh from the stream, a recent ritual, in case the babies came suddenly during the night. He kicked off his boots and stripped his coat before giving her a kiss. He had to bend down from a bit farther back to account for her new shape.

“Would you mind?” Rey asked as she held up the large jar of honey and lavender oil she’d mixed.

He grinned at her. “Not in the least.”

Humming as she undid the sash of her robe, she plopped down onto the settee in front of the fire. Kylo knelt and began gently smearing the sweet mixture over her distended belly, tracing the jagged pink lines that betrayed the extent of her burden. Under his touch, the tightness of her skin eased slightly.

“So much kicking tonight.”

“They’re restless. Ready for the world, I suppose,” she said as he laid a kiss just below her popped navel, slicking his lips with honey.

The slide was slow, beginning with the slump of her shoulder and followed by the press of his chest against her knees. As one leg kept to the floor the other edged back and up until it draped over his shoulder, her thigh hot on his neck. He kissed her cunt as sweetly as he would kiss her mouth, the tip of his tongue trailing along the seam of her folds before coaxing them open. Rey sank back the rest of the way, resting haphazardly on the thin cushions.

She couldn’t see him now, his crouched body eclipsed by her stomach, but she could feel the details of him. The tip of his nose lightly touching her skin, his fingers digging into her thigh, his panting breath that had his shoulder rising and falling beneath the back of her knee. 

His mouth explored every inch of her cunt it could without touching her clit that was pulsing and pleading to be sucked. She couldn’t urge him on by arching her back and bucking her hips. Nor could she pull at his hair the way he liked her to do when he consumed her this way. Her weight and the angle wouldn’t allow it. The demonstration of her pleasure was confined to trembling legs and a gasping cry. But Kylo gave no hint that he minded, his words of praise bubbling between the smacking of his lips.

Over the past several months, she’d discovered that the longer the babies lingered inside her the quicker the spindle of her pleasure wound. He had only just relented to her desperate mewing and sealed his lips tightly around her clit when she cried out. Her climax curled her toes and her cunt clamped down lamenting the absence of her husband’s cock even in her moment of ecstasy.

“Knot me,” Rey begged, still shaking.

“Are you certain?” he asked, his voice double-edged with concern and need. She hadn’t taken his knot for the past few weeks. She’d grown so large that it had become uncomfortable for her to lie still for overly long. 

“I need it. Please!” 

Kylo nodded and then offered his hand to help her up but she resisted.

“It’s too cold in the bedroom to be naked.”

“The settee won’t hold us both, sweetheart. Not in a position I could knot you.”

“Help me to the floor.”

He stared at her with his lips rolled and pinched between his teeth. 

“Would you deny me anything while I’m in this state? Help me to the floor,” she repeated and he did so warily. After a bit of negotiation, he sat on the floor with his back to the settee and his long legs outstretched. Rey maneuvered, with the use of Kylo’s strength, over his cock, facing his feet and the fire beyond.

“Are you alright like this?” he asked, his hands already cupping the cheeks of her ass to support her as she hovered over his erection.

She nodded and braced her hands on the floor between his knees. His palms pressed into her bottom even harder now, spreading her and facilitating his view. By the wild noise he made as she enveloped him, it wouldn’t be long before he knotted her.

She did her best to bounce over his cock, the pace languid but steady. The invisible tongues of the flames lapped across her skin, her movement and the nearness of the fire heating her into a sweat. She felt a bit wild herself, heavily pregnant and riding her Alpha’s cock.

“Lie back,” Kylo yelled suddenly. She did her best to obey, shifting her weight and offering an arm behind her which he took and wrenched until her back collided with his chest. The change of position took mere seconds, but his knot was already half engorged. 

Safely braced against him now, without the danger of falling forward while knotted, she melted against him. He was trembling as his come spurted into her but still he caressed her. One hand stroked her belly that was tinted gold by her honey mixture, while the other lazily squeezed her breast. 

“Filled with your children and filled by your cock. I’ve never been this full before,” she said and Kylo groaned loudly, his cock twitching at her declaration. And still his knot grew, her cunt aching with the stretch. 

A stream of sweat was running over her witch’s mark. Drawing her fingers through it, she flicked the salty droplets at the fire, the flames billowing a lucent grey before returning to the usual amalgam of gold and red.

The babies had resumed their kicking, enlivened by the quickening of her pulse as Kylo’s fingers slipped south and worried her clit. The movement of them within her, their hands and feet testing the walls of her belly, was visible. 

“And I grow restless too,” Rey moaned as she came once more, writhing on Kylo’s knot.

* * *

_By fire and spit_  
_with living breath drawn from stone_  
_Sweetness and grit_  
_thicken to blood and form bone_  
_Blue cords unknit_  
_from a womb they’ve outgrown_  
_Fate’s path unlit_  
_Alpha and witch yet unknown_

* * *

It was sitting on the kitchen table when she came in from the garden. She didn’t know what _it_ was exactly but she was intrigued. Three metal rings that were fused together. The base circle lay flat while the other two tented to form a triangle. She picked it up and took note of how cool and smooth it felt. She imagined that Kylo had crafted it for a specific use, his metalwork was rarely simply aesthetic, but she couldn’t discern what it was for. 

The muffled lullaby from the other room faded away and soon Kylo tiptoed up behind her. Silently, he handed her the bowl of the bell she’d bewitched to ring when one of the babies cried, the clapper of which hung over their cribs. She added a loaf of bread, some cheese and a jug of cider to the basket of fresh vegetables she’d just brought in from the garden. 

Kylo hooked the basket over his elbow and offered her his hand. With raised eyebrows, she tipped her chin at the metal rings on the table. She dared not speak lest the babies roused again. 

He picked up the rings and dropped them into the pocket of her skirt. “A gift,” he breathed against her ear and led her outside.

It wasn’t much of a journey as they had to keep close to the cottage; Kylo laid a blanket out on the far side of the garden wall. With their backs to the stacked stones, they looked onto the forest. They drank and ate and talked of the things that childless couples converse over- the weather, the crops, nothings of little importance. Like many idle conversations, it slipped into long pauses and longing glances. The words faded but their lips kept at their work as they turned their heads to one another and kissed.

Kylo lowered his mouth to her neck. Nuzzling between the strands of her unbound hair, his hands idly caressed her breast. Rey leaned into his touch, the movement reminding her of the weight in her pocket. She fished out the metal circles and displayed them on her outstretched palm. 

“This gift,” she said, “does it have to do with the direction we seem to be moving in just now?”

“You’re too clever,” Kylo said pausing his exploration of her throat, “It’s merely an option if you would like me inside you without the anxiety of my knot.”

“It goes over your cock?” 

“Mmhmm,” he hummed noncommittally. The thought of how the contraption would look on him sent an unexpected pulse through her cunt. It had been since just before the babies were born that she’d been knotted. Her cunt had healed weeks ago but her nerves regarding not the movement of sex but the stretch had extended the dry spell.

He’d been so patient and even now she noticed how he was carefully watching her for hints to her thoughts. Surely noting the flush of her cheeks, he continued, “It’s something that I had thought of before I left Farrows. An abandoned experiment that I hazarded to revisit. It’s meant to keep my knot from inflating.”

“And the result of your experiments?” she asked despite already knowing the answer. If he had brought this to her then it would do as he promised and stymie his knot.

“Perfected.”

“You can come like this?”

“That I have not been able to trial.”

Rey turned the contraption over in her hand as she contemplated the option it presented. “Would you try it on?”

Kylo kissed the cap of her shoulder before undoing the front of his pants. She watched as he slipped his shaft through the first ring and then the second that aimed skyward, before carefully passing his balls through the first and then the third ring that went south. It stretched him in both directions at once.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Only aches,” he said and he drew her closer until she was straddling his thighs. She stared down at his groin, transfixed by the contrast of soft flesh and the unforgiving metal that encircled him thrice. 

Their bodies, changed by magic, by babies, by iron, still kept the same rhythm of their love. Rey plied her mouth to his and his arms held her tight. The warm breath of the wind picked up, rustling through the beech leaves. It was the sound of the ocean that she heard in her dreams, the rush of a great sea she had yet to witness. 

“What is the Nebula like?” she asked. 

Kylo cocked his head, “Why do you ask?”

“The rise and fall of your chest, the wind rustling through the leaves and the thought of something so great I can’t fully conceive of it. Poets say that love is an ocean but I didn’t really consider it until this moment.”

He nodded and his eyes refocused on the invisible middle distance of memory as he spoke, “The air tastes of salt and always feels like the morning after a storm. Its touch is soft but there’s a sharpness to its absence that lingers on the skin.” 

He drew a finger along her throat before settling into the notch between her collarbones. “Immense. Dangerous. Beautiful. A bit like love, I suppose.”

His fingertip inched farther down and hooked the lace of her dress that was loosely knotted. Plucking the lace free, he peeled open her bodice to expose her. The dappled light that fell through the leaves imitated on a grander scale the dusting of freckles that speckled her skin. His finger moved lower still until he touched the golden expanse of her breasts. 

He kissed her ear, then her cheek before settling his mouth on her throat. She leaned back to offer every bit of her exposed body to him. His hands covered her, keeping her from the world. He was gently squeezing her right breast when a stream of her milk hit his neck. 

Rey shrieked with embarrassment and covered her face. 

“Sweetheart? It’s alright.”

A hot blush spread from her cheeks to the already rosy flesh of her nipples; she was mortified beyond measure.

“Rey,” he said more sternly now but she couldn’t look at him. She’d only just begun to dip her toes back into the rushing stream of their intimacy. She’d been so comforted and thus bolstered by Kylo’s metal contraption. Then she’d gone and ruined everything.

His fingertips dug into her hips and he pulled her until her crotch was over his groin. She gasped as the stiff pressure of his erection protested her feelings of both shame and failure.

“Do you feel that?” he asked, his voice low and trembling, “The milk from your breast caused that.”

Rey peeked at him from between her fingers and read the sincerity on his face, plain as the sun in a cloudless sky. With the front of his pants still open, his straining cock had only the fabric of her skirt to contend with.

“Let me touch you,” he said and she nodded.

His large hands cupped the undersides of her breasts. Even with his support they felt heavy, having nearly doubled in size since the milk had come. Gently, he massaged them until white beads dotted each nipple.

“Can I taste you?” 

His request had her desire reverberating from navel to knees. She hadn’t considered her milk to be anything other than sustenance. She bit her lip and then murmured, “Yes.”

He made his tongue cuplike and settled it just below her stiff peak as he squeezed her more tightly. A droplet fell and he caught it. He displayed his tongue to her, making sure she saw the milk there before closing his mouth and then closing his eyes and moaning.

“I didn’t think it was possible,” he said with a grin sneaking across his lips.

“You didn’t think what was possible?”

“That anything could taste better than your cunt.”

Rey swatted his shoulder but whimpered all the same. Arousal was leaking out of her now, dampening her skirt. She pulled away the fabric from the part of her it offended, unclothing her cunt. Her fingers wrapped over the base of his cock. Satisfied by the rings’ presence but not by their distance from her core, she pushed up onto her knees and then settled back down, burying her husband within.

A deep guttural sound thundered from Kylo’s chest and for a moment only the whites of his eyes were visible. She waited, watching him physically remember the joy of their sex that had been absent for far too long. 

“Are you sure it won’t hurt you?” she asked, slowly lifting up and then dropping back down.

“I honestly don’t care. I couldn’t give this up for anything right now.”

The nervousness she’d buried deep concerning whether Kylo would still desire her the way he had before the children were born vanished. It was plain in both his words and actions that he wanted her more than ever. Holding tight to Kylo’s shoulders, Rey leaned back to expose herself to him more fully.

With one hand, he fondled her left breast, stroking her skin, circling her nipple and then squeezing her just right to coax her spray. White droplets flecked his chest. Any last traces of her embarrassment were washed away by the rapturous look of his eyes. She bounced over him, her breasts aching with the movement but she did not dare to stop. All the while he worried her clit with his deft fingertips.

“Goddess,” he whispered and the emotion of his words pushed her over the edge, her climax taking her by surprise. She shivered and groaned, slumping against his chest and panting into the crook of his neck. 

When she finally felt steady again, she lifted off his lap and gasped. Kylo’s cock was a deep shade of red and had swollen thicker than its normal girth by the restraint of the rings.

Desperate to relieve him, she moved to sit back against the garden wall and coaxed him to lay with his head in her lap. She ran her fingers through his dark hair tracing the edge of his ear as her other hand moved to his cock. Wet with her come, her hand slid easily over his shaft as she rolled his foreskin up and down.

Wedging an arm below his head, she cradled him close and bent over until her left breast pressed against his cheek and her nipple touched his lips. With a breathy sigh, he opened his mouth and latched on. The peculiar yet comforting rush of her milk letting down competed with the wet pulse between her legs.

She continued to stroke him as he suckled her breast. And just like the contrast of the unforgiving cage and the flushed flesh of his cock, she saw the contrast echoed in the whole of him. He was strength and ferocity, a kind of feral animal on occasion but also sweet and gentle, and desperate for comfort. 

Kylo whimpered and his teeth pinched her nipple nearly to the point of real pain. But her concern lay not with her own body but his. She watched, equally frightened and fascinated, as the base of his cock throbbed and strained against the metal around it, his knot brutally restricted from inflating. She thought to pull away and free her breast from his mouth and relieve his cock of her hand but then Kylo yelped and thick ropes of come shot over his stomach as his body convulsed.

So often his climax occurred while she was lost in her own stretched pleasure, she rarely witnessed it like this- vulnerable and a little violent. She caressed his stomach with one finger, drawing the digit through the splatter of his come. She sucked her fingertip between her lips and tasted him. His come was just as salty, she imagined, as the ocean that had carried him to her.

“Lover,” she whispered and bent lower down to kiss him, licking drops of her sweet milk from his lips.


	5. Chapter 5

“In the blink of an eye,” Rey said, leaning heavily into her husband as they walked the forest path. Each had an arm wrapped around the other’s back, but Kylo was bearing her weight.

“Quicker than that,” Kylo said and he squeezed her shoulder. 

“I’m not ready.”

“I don’t know how we ever could be. Nevertheless.”

Rey sighed. “Nevertheless.”

Two silhouettes, wiry echoes of their own, proceeded them through the trees. Without warning, one of the shades lurched to the side.

“Benedict! Don’t push your sister,” Kylo groaned, “She’s the only one you have.”

A boy, a sinewy copy of Kylo, spun round and shouted, “She elbowed me first!”

“Did not!”

“Beatrix! Don’t elbow your brother,” Rey said and tried to keep a chuckle from undermining her tone.

“But I-,” protested a girl with reedy limbs, freckles and a sharp smile. She cut herself short, however, when Rey held up one finger.

“Come now,” said Rey so softly that her children had to quit their tussle to hear her, “I won’t be having you two bickering through the Winter Solstice.”

“You can’t be cross, Ma, it’s our birthday,” Benedict said, retreating a few steps to kiss his mother’s cheek.

“That’s right,” Beatrix added as she hurried back to grab Benedict’s arm. Whatever had sparked their quarrel faded from thought as they hooked elbows and turned to proceed back down the path.

When the children were far enough not to hear but still close enough to be seen, Kylo said to Rey, “They can sense our disquiet.” 

Rey nodded her agreement. “They have every right to be disquieted. We’ve kept nothing from them,” she said as her memory cast back over the myriad conversations preparing their children for this night. But it wasn’t the twins’ questions or even their pleas that she remembered so much as the terror in their eyes. It was Benedict’s stoicism with lips pressed white as he held Beatrix who dissolved so easily to tears. And it was Kylo’s patient indulgence of the twins’ wild plans to cheat fate that ended with his restatement of the facts. The most exigent fact being that they wouldn’t know if either were Alpha or omega until the last moment of the day that marked the beginning of their thirteenth year. It would be a moment that would determine the rest of all their lives. 

And it hadn’t been just Benedict and Beatrix who acted out the worry they felt inside. There was Kylo, in the privacy of their bedroom, knelt before Rey on his knees, his face pressed to her lap, his shoulders shaking with swallowed sobs. _Forgive me_ , he’d beg and Rey would shake her head and stroke his hair. 

She too was plagued by guilt and one night she’d stolen from bed as Kylo slept fitfully and she’d taken the offending spell book from the shelf. Without hesitation she’d torn out the page, the one with _Knotgrass_ in calligraphy across the top and the spell that had made her omega along the bottom. She’d burned the page and had eaten the ashes. A jagged edge in the gutter of the book, the only evidence of her misdeed besides the foreboding weight she now always felt low in her stomach. Difficult to conjure and even more difficult to write, magic’s destruction was forbidden. But Rey’s actions had ensured that the spell could never again be cast, an act of treachery she’d rashly been willing to chance.

The trees stood farther and farther apart and slowly buildings filled the gaps until the homes and shops grew as thick as the woods. Without the branches overhead, Rey could see the sun pressing against the great grey blanket of the winter sky. They caught up to Benedict and Beatrix who were lingering at the fork that split the path, the right ran toward the village green and the left tangled and turned toward the forge.

“We’ll be about an hour,” Rey said to her children, “We’ll meet you beneath the Great Juniper.”

The twins nodded and Benedict held out one hand to Kylo who offered him some coins. 

“Bea will want some honey cakes,” Benedict said and Kylo conceded by adding two more coins. Rey took the opportunity to straighten Beatrix’s crown- a beautiful nest of red dogwood set off by her black hair.

“Could I give you the blessing this year?” Beatrix asked quietly. Rey smiled and nodded and watched as her daughter, who normally hunched her shoulders to fold down her height, threw back her head and recited-

_“Night’s canopy stretched to full extent_  
_stars ignite flames of new intent_  
_abeyant earth benumbs turmoil_  
_and so shall your mind be content”_

“Thank you,” Rey said, her heart skipping with pride.

“Could you feel it?” Beatrix asked, slouching back in upon herself and nervously chewing her lip.

“Oh, Bea,” Rey said, “We won’t know until tonight, you know that.”

Beatrix lowered her eyes, veiling her grief. Rey was pained by it all; she wanted nothing more than her daughter to bear a witch’s mark but there was nothing Rey could do to ensure it. While magic often followed lineages, a bloodline was no guarantee. Just as Rey’s parents themselves were not witches but she had been called all the same. 

Rey tucked an errant strand of Beatrix’s hair back up under the crown and then gave her an encouraging smile. Benedict was already pinching at his sister’s sleeve, anxious for them to set off on their own.

“Stay together,” Rey called after her children as they waved and vanished into the gathering crowd.

“They’ll be half sick on sweets,” Kylo said to Rey as he led her in the opposite direction of the flow of villagers, “You should have stayed with them.”

She said nothing in response. She wanted to spend every minute with her children that night but she also needed a reprieve. Since the twins’ birth their fate had become a speck of sand caught in her mouth, one she could not spit out nor swallow. She felt it always, roughing her cheeks and tongue, a constant irritant. On the rare occasion she forgot its presence, it would rudely remind her, gritting between her teeth. 

Kylo stopped short in front of the forge’s door. “Let me go in,” he said softly.

“I’ll see them soon enough.” Her jaw was set, she would not take his argument.

He swallowed his retort and opened the door, holding it at the top corner so Rey could pass under his arm. It was dark and a rough smoke could be tasted as well as smelled. He hung their lantern in the center of the room and then drew the curtain over the one window. 

“Everything changed the night we met,” said Rey, “It seems to me that everything is about to change all over again. I fear it is for the worse.”

“We have a plan, sweetheart, there is nothing else we can do. If Benedict presents, then he and I leave The Wilds for a few years. It takes time for a new Alpha to settle into his skin, but eventually he’ll be able to control himself.”

“Except for when I’m in heat,” Rey added wearily.

“Yes. But that’s only if Benedict presents. As for Beatrix, it will be complicated, she’ll want to nest and lure me there but she’ll be in no danger from me. You are my mate. You bear my mark. I can resist even while she’s in heat.”

“But if they both present, and we have a new Alpha and omega in our family. We’ll have to keep them separate for-” Rey cut herself off and muffled her pained cry with her hand. They’d had thirteen years to discuss this, to decide on their course of action, but the dreaded outcome of their family being halved indefinitely, to that she’d never grown accustomed to, not even the thought of it.

“You’ll be strong, for Beatrix, if that comes to pass. She’ll need you to keep her safe. And I will protect Benedict with my life.”

“They would never be able to be near each other again. Not without risking their safety, their sanity.”

“I know,” was all Kylo could manage in reply. With a tired sigh he stooped and pulled from a box two thick chains, each with a pair of manacles. He took the restraints, a mallet and two stakes and placed them in a sack atop the worktable.

Unintended, a sharp cry escaped from Rey at the sight of the precautions that Kylo had assembled.

“They will only wear them for a moment, until I am certain if they’ve presented,” said Kylo, “That is all.”

She pressed her face to his chest and snuck her arms between the open panels of his coat to hold him closely to her. It wasn’t just for her children that she feared but also for Kylo and for herself. She would do anything for Benedict and Beatrix, to keep them safe, but what of her own life, of her and Kylo’s love? She could not imagine keeping from him for one year much less the six that Kylo had proclaimed it would take for an Alpha to settle. Six years would be an eternity and if both children presented, they would have to abandon the close-knit nature of their lives and exist like unfurled strands, their children flung to long distances. And what then? Would they abandon their children to make new lives and reconvene without them?

Her heart began to race at the thought of it all; she wanted Kylo to feel her anxiety and perhaps to match it so she didn’t feel so alone. She sunk her teeth into his shirt over his heart, catching the heft of his chest muscle in her bite. Kylo flinched between her jaws but he did not pull away. Instead he cupped her nape, his middle finger stretching to stroke the mark of his own bite that she bore along the side of her neck. She’d never considered returning the gesture in kind before now.

His blunt nails pitched into her skin. “Harder,” Kylo said and she obeyed, baring down her teeth until little beads of blood sprung up from under each tooth. She pulled back and opened his shirt to see the jagged circle she’d made just over his heart.

“We should get back,” Kylo said but he didn’t pull away. She could feel his cock swelling from where it touched her belly.

“It could be years,” she said, as she pressed herself to him, drawing deep breaths, reminding him of her body’s rhythm that he could rescore with merely a touch.

“Dampen the lantern.”

Rey licked her fingertip and then blew across it; the light that filled the room lessened until they were half cast in shadow. Sitting down in a chair that’s back was braced by the worktable, Kylo pulled his cock free from his pants. He stroked himself as Rey lifted her skirts and then settled over him. It was nothing like their sex when their bodies had been new to each other and every caress had made them nervous. And it was a far cry from the frantic, desperate coupling when she was in heat. This was lovemaking as mortar. Their foundation was already laid and they needed no new ornamentation, sex like this was merely to trace the bones of their house and recall what they’d already built together.

With her hands on his shoulders she bounced over him, memorizing each sensation, each curve, each twitch, the way he filled her. No matter what happened tonight, no matter if the children presented as their parents had, as Alpha and omega, she would remember this. The magnitude of the loving act bore down upon her.

He kissed the mark on her neck, as he often did when his climax was closing in. She gripped his hair to pull him off, and Kylo, misinterpreting what she wanted, tried to capture her lips. But Rey felt cloistered by his embrace and did not want to have any more points of contact and thus pulled her mouth away. He was too forgone now to notice her distance as he grunted and the pulsing weight of his knot locked his cock inside her. It was then that she caught sight of the chains spilling from the sack onto the worktable behind him. They were just lying there, amongst his other tools, waiting to be used to shackle her children. The walls of the forge crushed closer, the lantern flame burning off all the air. Rey clawed at her throat unable to breathe.

“No!” she screamed as she shoved hard at Kylo’s chest. “Let me go! Let me go!”

“I can’t! Damnit, Rey, stop fighting! You know I can’t. Please, sweetheart, you need to breathe!”

Her fists flew against his chest, desperate to push him away. Her whole body throbbed with a pain that overwhelmed any rational thought. The more she tried to climb off his cock the more everything hurt and the more certain she was that she was about to die. Dark figures descended all around her. She screamed again and the lantern exploded plunging them into the darkness that already held her tight.

By the time the monsters’ shadows showed themselves to be merely the anvil, the post vise and the bellows, the sweat dripping from her brow was cold.

“Rey? Can you hear me? Please,” Kylo’s words were muffled like he were speaking through a thick wall despite his still intimate proximity.

She wiped her face, her hand coming away wet and her fingers smelling of blood. “Oh maker,” she gasped as she stared at her palm that was abnormally dark.

“It’s alright, sweetheart. It’s not yours.”

Concern cut through her panic and she spat at the lantern but there was nothing left of it to obey her. She spat then at the forge which immediately erupted in flames, flooding the room with light. The alarm of confusion gave way to the horror of certainty. Kylo’s face was a thin mask of blood. He’d tried to wipe it away but without water his pale skin had only cleaned to an unnerving pink. A long, open gash ran across his face and chest, the latter framed by the frayed edges of his slashed shirt. His nose and right eye were swollen into an unrecognizable form.

“Did I-” Rey couldn’t bring herself to ask. 

“In part,” Kylo said softly, “but mainly I blame the chisel.” 

It was only then that she noticed the tool that was clenched tightly in her hand. 

“Oh no! Oh no! Oh Kylo! I’m so sorry!” she wailed and buried her face in his chest, blood wetting the ridge of her left fist.

“You panicked, Rey. It’s not your fault.”

He held her with his arms loosely around her shoulders until she was done crying. By then his knot had deflated enough for her to wriggle her way off without hurting either of them.

Quietly, Rey first helped to clean Kylo’s wound and then to do away with the traces of their sex, before settling their clothes. There were ointments and charmed bandages she could apply but that would have to wait until they were home. 

“We’ll be late,” Kylo said slinging the sack that held the chains over his shoulder before taking her hand. She was still shaken by hurting him so greatly while being unawares but the gravity of the evening prevented her from dwelling upon it for too long. They had to keep to the schedule, fate waited for no one.

They were almost out the door when Kylo stopped short, his hand hovering in midair. He breathed deeply, his whole torso inflating with the act. With dissatisfaction clear on his face, he pulled her against him, pressing his mangled nose to the crown of her head and breathing just as deeply again.

“What is it?” she asked.

Kylo’s teeth chewed the corner of his mouth for a moment and then he said, “I can’t smell you. Nothing of lavender nor the wet earth of your omega scent. I won’t be able to smell any presentation on Benedict or Bea.”

Rey wrung her hands and tamped down another apology that would get them nowhere. “Perhaps I can detect if they’re presenting?”

“You are only familiar with my odor, Rey; there are nuances. You wouldn’t be a reliable judge.” Kylo frowned, deepening the already prominent worry lines across his brow that ran askew of the fresh, angry gash. “I’ll think of something,” he said and then led her out the door.

By the time they actually found Benedict and Beatrix in the crowd amassed around the Great Juniper, Kylo’s right eye had swollen shut completely and his cheek was deeply purple. Beatrix gasped when she saw him and her bottom lip trembled.

“It’s alright, Bea,” said Kylo with a smile intentionally stretched only across one side of his face to keep the cut on his other cheek from pulling farther open. “I should have knocked the icicles off the roof before opening the door.”

Benedict watched the exchange suspiciously but did not voice his thoughts aloud. Rey pulled her son to her and whispered against his ear, “It was an accident regardless of the tale. It will not do to upset her even more tonight.”

Benedict nodded in agreement of his sister’s fragility and then said to all of them, “Can Bea and I take one last turn around the bonfire before we head back? We haven’t cast our wishes yet.”

“We’ll join in,” said Kylo taking Rey’s arm and leaning down and into her to obscure his injury from the celebrating crowd.

The children used cinder-tipped sticks to write their desires across pieces of birch bark before tossing them into the flames. The white strips glowed bright as the fire curled them inward, sheltering their words until nothing was left but ashes. It was bad fortune to tell of what you wrote on a Winter Solstice scroll, but Rey knew her children well enough to guess. Benedict would have blindly wished for Bea’s wish to be fulfilled and Bea would have wished to become both a witch and powerful. 

Rey wrote her own desire on a piece of bark and held it to her breast, eyes pressed closed for a minute, before she threw it into the fire. Unlike the others’ offerings hers popped and hissed and glowed bright blue before vanishing without a trace.

“Do I dare ask?” Kylo said to which Rey shook her head.

“It would spoil it. Do you not want to offer up your desires for the year to come?”

“If I do not name my wants then I will not be disappointed,” he answered gravely.

The path back to the cottage felt twice as long and their boots were doubly heavy. The sun was gone now and without the warmth of the bonfire and the crowd it was truly cold. Unlike the journey to the village a few hours ago they walked all separately, trapped alone in individual thought. 

Once they’d reached the cottage, Kylo split off and went to the newly built run-in shed and led out two dapple gray horses. Rey and the children watched on in silence as he harnessed the animals to the wagons that were each piled high with goods- one for Rey and Beatrix as well as one for Kylo and Benedict. They were poised, facing in opposite directions, ready to leave everything behind if the worst were to come to fruition.

Kylo then dipped into the cottage for a minute before joining them once more. He had a brightly painted box tucked under each arm.

“Time for gifts,” Rey said, doing her best to sound cheery. Benedict and Beatrix gaped at her in surprise.

“Gifts?” the twins questioned in concert.

“Of course,” said Rey, “It’s your birthday.”

“But-”

“But what? Birthdays are to be celebrated with gifts, especially such important ones as the threshold from child to adult.” 

Without any more prompting, Kylo handed each a box. Beatrix opened hers first to reveal four small jars of seeds. She peered at them closely and then exclaimed, “Belladonna! Datura! Foxglove! Even Wolfsbane! Are you certain?”

Rey smiled and squeezed Beatrix’s shoulder. “You are old enough to tend such powerful plants. But you must be careful with them, especially that last one.”

“Thank you!” Beatrix squealed and hugged both her mother and father. 

Benedict, having been happy for his sister to have everyone’s attention first, now tore into his present. “Hurrah!” he shouted as he displayed the tidy kit of woodworking tools. “Exactly what I wanted. I’ll be able to build you a fine trellis with these, Bea.”

And just like that, the present was spoiled by the thought of an uncertain future. Kylo patted his son on the back and then urged the twins to tuck their gifts into their respective wagons. The horses stamped impatiently in the snow. Rey tried to envision a future where both carts were disassembled that night and all slept in their own beds. The image did not come easily.

Now Benedict, Beatrix and Kylo filed one by one behind Rey. Carefully, she picked a path to the Hawthorn that acted as the mortal anchor for the spirit coven. It was an act of treachery to bring Kylo here, it was only to be a sacred space for witches and children offering themselves to bear the Horned God’s mark. But in consideration that witches too presented at the moment childhood was left behind, same as Alphas and omegas, Rey had decided that an exception had to be made.

The brush around the Hawthorn was dense during the height of summer but in the desolation of winter there was a tidy clearing a few meters wide around its base. Kylo set to work driving the stakes into the frozen ground with his mallet and then attaching the chains. 

“Just a precaution,” Rey whispered to her children who watched their father work, their eyes gone wide. “So no one gets hurt.”

She hazarded a glance to the stars above, it was nearly time, they would have to hurry. Rey placed the manacles over Beatrix’s wrists and Kylo did the same for Benedict. The chains allowed them to stand up straight comfortably but beyond that not much movement would be easy. Rey dragged her heel through the snow, plowing two tidy circles, marking the distance that each would be able to move at their most agile. The two circles did not touch.

Kylo unwound the scarf that was knotted over Rey’s neck and tied it to Benedict’s, pulling the edge to cover the boy’s mouth and nose. He then shrugged off his coat and draped it over Beatrix’s shoulders, turning up the collar.

“You’ll react to our scents,” Kylo said to the children as he joined Rey just outside the circles. He added quietly to Rey, “We’ll see it in their eyes.”

She nodded, remembering the distinct look Kylo’s eyes took on when he breathed her in deep. Rey checked the sky once more, it was time, only moments to go. A union of two rituals, both that promised great power- one of witchery and one of a wolf’s heart. Yet only one harbored terror too; but time for lamentation of curses and of fate had passed. Rey extended her arms, one bare palm held up to the sky and one open over the ground. With her back to the Hawthorn, her heels pressed against the obsidian stone where she had thrown bones before. At the top of her lungs, she called out,

_“Oh Spirit Coven,_  
_Cast the above down, raise up my grave plea_  
_Wake the cloven crown, break the wicked free”_

The beech trees rattled their leaves overhead and the hard-packed snow beneath her feet cracked like the web of a spider. Without warning, a scalding wind raced through the woods, and Rey gasped as the heat singed her skin and frayed the tips of her hair. She held her breath until a black flame rose off the hawthorn, the trunk an untouched wick. She hollered over the rushing sound of fire,

_“Oh Horned God,_  
_Prying sky and earth, I did summon thee_  
_Gild breasts deemed of worth, ‘neath this sacred tree”_

The black flame cracked upwards in a bolt of lightning, ever reaching for the stars. Then just as quickly as it had ignited the fire was out. The Hawthorn, Rey, and her family all stood unscathed.

“Was that it?” Kylo asked nervously to which she nodded.

Rey examined the twins carefully, if the Spirit Coven and the Horned God had heeded her incantation then the time for either to present as Alpha or omega also had just come to pass. Benedict’s head was dropped, his chin against his chest and his eyes hidden from view. Rey grabbed Kylo’s hand and waited. Finally, Benedict raised his head, his eyes were dark in the low light but not unnaturally so.

“Ma?” Benedict called to her; his voice slightly muffled by the scarf. And then he pulled down the collar of his coat and shirt- a fierce amber light beamed out. 

“You’re a witch, Benedict,” Rey said as tears of happiness sprung from her eyes and she laughed. Her mirth was not merely owed to her son’s new magic but also to his calm demeanor despite her scent about his mouth. Benedict was not Alpha.

Rey looked to Beatrix then who was buried in Kylo’s coat. Her hands, swallowed by the too long sleeves, were pressed against her face. She was sobbing.

Rey stepped forward, eager to comfort her daughter but Kylo tightened his grip. “Wait,” he hissed and then said loudly, “Bea, please show us your eyes.”

Beatrix sniffled and then dropped her hands. The whites of her eyes were already reddening with tears but her irises and pupils were all her own.

“Breathe deep,” Kylo said, modeling her breathing into the armpit of his coat. Beatrix obeyed but nothing in her countenance changed.

“Is it safe now?” Rey asked and he nodded.

“Let me speak to her first,” Kylo said and Rey reluctantly agreed. Beatrix would not want her witch mother just now.

Rey went to Benedict and undid his constraints. She didn’t dare speak any words of congratulations to her son lest Beatrix overheard. She could not, however, help but wink which he returned in kind with a grin nearly as bright as his mark. She hadn’t been at all certain that either of them would wield magic. But there had been a few moments during her pregnancy when she had noticed a spark of energy that was not unique to her own, and she had dared to hope.

Rey couldn’t hear what Kylo was saying as Beatrix rubbed at her eyes and nodded while he undid the irons that clasped her wrists. Beatrix wouldn’t look at him nor Rey, she merely stared at the ground. Every bit of her displaying the disappointment she clearly felt. Poor Beatrix, so desperate to be special in some way yet not graced with a witch’s mark when even her brother had been.

A light snowfall had started up. Soft, fat flakes tumbled through the Hawthorn’s branches. With the excitement of the night now passed, Rey’s body-heat abated; a wet cold clamped across her skin. Beatrix’s cheeks, however, flushed a warm pink and she sloughed off her father’s coat. The thick fabric that had enveloped her tall but slender frame became nothing more than a dark shadow on the ground.

Beatrix’s head snapped up. Something dark flickered within her eyes. She lunged at Rey, covering the distance between them instantly, knocking her mother to the ground. Rey’s breath expelled violently from her lungs, stealing the scream that would have come as Beatrix clawed at Rey’s throat and her skirt.

Only a second passed but it felt like forever before Kylo lifted Beatrix off her. The normally meek girl was kicking and ramming her elbows behind her, trying to force Kylo to let go. Rey laid there in the snow, stunned by the turn of events. It wasn’t possible but here it was all the same. Yet she remembered then, that Kylo had told her once, long ago, that there were men and women of his kin, that displayed Alpha and omega characteristics of the other sex. By the wild look of her eyes, the snarling from between her teeth- Beatrix was Alpha. 

Benedict stooped to help Rey to stand, before hurriedly leading her towards the clearing. As mother and son ran, there was a great crashing noise behind them closing in. When they were finally back in front of the cottage, they paused to catch their breath. Rey doubled over, both the speed of their sprint and the fright of Beatrix’s attack threatened to upturn the contents of her stomach.

Beatrix flew out of the forest then, her dogwood crown fallen from her head and her hair broken from its braid. Brush snapping across her face had left sharp red scratches. But it was her eyes that betrayed her most, her pupils blown so large that none of the sweet honey brown of her irises could be seen. In that moment, she was no less wild than any animal born from the woods.

Kylo came sprinting after her a second later. His recent wound torn open, blood pouring down his face.

“Run!” Kylo yelled as he grabbed Beatrix again, “If I take her, she’ll find her way back. You must run as far as you can.”

“I can’t leave her!” Rey screamed. There had been a plan. A plan that might have kept her from an Alpha son for some years, a plan for if the children had to be kept apart indefinitely. But there had never been a plan where her sweet, fragile baby girl was not by her side for even one night. Rey hadn’t conceived of it.

“You have no choice. Take Benedict, Rey. Take him. Please, go now!”

Beatrix was growling and thrashing in her father’s grip. He was trying to hold her without hurting her but it couldn’t last long. Either Beatrix would break free or Kylo would have to forcibly set her back into her chains. Rey could not bear the thought of either outcome.

“Please, sweetheart!” Kylo shouted, his voice breaking like brittle glass.

Benedict’s insistent grip on Rey’s arm finally prevailed. They turned and ran to the wagon that had been prepared for Kylo and Benedict. Rey tumbled into the wagon bed as Ben took to the seat and gripped the reins. A soft thud sounded at her side and she vaguely noted that Bumblebee had thrown his lot in with theirs, his fiery fur flashing past her before he burrowed beneath a blanket.

The tangled mess of Beatrix and Kylo continued to battle so fiercely that great dark swaths of frozen ground were unveiled as their bracing stances plowed away the snow. Rey’s mind was shaking violently, the tumult echoed in the raucous movement of the wagon over the uneven ground. The horrid scene faded with each racing moment until it was nearly gone. Just as the cottage blurred from view behind the heavy snowflakes, Rey lurched forward onto her hands and knees. She bit her bottom lip hard until her mouth erupted with her own blood. She spat on the ground and then in a harsh whisper she incanted-

_“Spin to yarn what I have bled_  
_Stitch it through the darkened loam_  
_Red as Ariadne’s thread_  
_Heartstring to guide us home”_

Rey collapsed onto her stomach; her cheek raw against the rough-hewn pine of the wagon. She would not turn onto her back and look up to the stars. She would not witness the rescindment of the blessing she’d once felt. She was cast out, her family cleaved. For the first time, she feared the power of curses.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Towards the end of this chapter Rey casts a spell using blood. It’s a bit squicky.

Rey sat with her chest braced against her thighs, her toes buried in the rough, pebbly sand. She didn’t believe in giants, but the behemoth before her, that moaned and moved at its own behest, was undeniably a living thing. Neither love nor an overstretch of the imagination could have prepared her for the sight of the sea. It was beyond mortal measure.

And it called to her. Its tides pulled at her bones. Its salted waves lapped against her skin, like a subtle tongue, a touch that was not forgotten but still, somehow, misremembered. There, too, was the surf, the epitome of enticement, that ebbed like pleasure about to spill. But she would not heed its siren’s song beyond the beach just yet.

Dawn was breaking now. She had always in her youth been a creature of dusk, enlivened as she was unburdened by any expectations the day behind her had once held. But she was no longer young, not as she had once been. She’d aged in ways not noted by years. Her soul was stiff and her mind weary. In the quiet of her morning solitude she thought of herself as a crone. A tired, broken thing imprisoned by her still supple body.

“I miss you both so much,” she whispered to the frothy waves that retreated from her sitting place. She was far too distant for her voice to carry by any means to anyone. Nonetheless, it eased her heartache to speak aloud to those she loved. 

Footfalls, first faint than bolder as they neared, sounded at her back. She closed her eyes tightly and let her mind sketch the noise into a body. It was her daughter first, exactly as she’d been six years ago, when Rey had seen her last. But the tread was heavier and the throat, perhaps still clotted with sleep, cleared with a sound that was definably male. It was Kylo approaching then, as he always came to her behind closed eyelids- more feeling than form. Warmth enveloped by heavy muscle. Desire buried in dark eyes.

The footsteps slowed but grew much louder, careful not to startle. Finally he said, “Mornin’.”

Rey turned and smiled at Benedict. “Good morning,” she replied. He dropped down next to her with a mug and a wide-mouth pot that had a rag wrapped around it. He wore a heavy coat to ward off the cold that she presently did not feel.

“Thank you,” she said as he poured her tea. She wasn’t thirsty. Her desire to eat or drink had been absent since the night before but she didn’t bother to tell him. He already knew. It was why he had come to find her waiting near the small rowboat that was staked on the beach.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said. He drained the remaining steaming liquid straight from the carafe while she took small sips of her own drink to appease him.

“Take a moment to watch the morning rise.”

He sat quietly, mirroring her with knees updrawn and resting his cheek on her shoulder. “I’ll miss this place,” he said and she understood the full implication- he would not miss the others. She shared his sentiment.

Before coming to the seaside city of Laving, they’d been rootless, broken branches in the wind. Witches were not taken to kindly beyond The Wilds and co-existence had been an unexpected luxury of a prior life. Thus they had moved and moved again. Eking out a subsistent living on Benedict’s carpentry and Rey’s careful, back-alley magic. 

Remaining in The Wilds, with customs they understood, would have been preferable. Keeping too close to Beatrix, however, would have been a great risk so they’d struck out beyond the border. They found the lands around them were not populated by familiar, scattered villages but rather by small cities. Privacy, the type needed to hide her heat and mask her and Benedict’s true nature, was not easy to come by. The solution had emerged in the form of Laving, a desolate town on the edge of the Nebula.

Rey set her emptied mug in the sand next to her son’s carafe. “Alright then,” she said and stood, patting at her dress to knock away the sand. 

Benedict didn’t move to join. He just sat and stared at the detritus of their morning tea.

“Ben?” she prodded but still he made no effort to follow. She noticed then his lips and cheeks had gone white and he was staring not at their things but only at her cup.

“What is it?” she asked carefully. 

“Nothing,” he said and with an anxious touch he upended her mug.

“I’ve never been one for reading tea leaves,” she said, “but there’s no reason against you reading mine.”

He rose up, his full height easily a head past her own. His skin was still an ashen color, his brow pulled low and knitted. He looked most like his father when he was troubled.

“Are you the parent now?” she chided gently, “Keeping dreadful things from me? Did I do that to you?”

Benedict begrudgingly shook his head. “There were two prophecies; linked, I suppose. An empty hearth,” he said and paused to rub his knuckles across his cheek; he added, “And a dead wolf.”

“Hmm,” she muttered and began walking toward the dingy skiff.

“Is that all you have to say?” he asked, following her closely.

“Fortune-telling is a tricky art. Not everything is always as it seems.”

“An empty hearth, Ma. A dead-” He swallowed the final word, the ill-omen sticking in his throat.

“When my heat has passed, we’ve already planned to set straight for home. It would be too dangerous to leave immediately. And if what you saw is true, nothing we do will change it.”

They did not speak anymore as Benedict pushed the boat into the surf and then held it steady while Rey climbed in. The world was only the rushing water now and the wings of terns across the sky. She bowed her head and wrapped her hair in her shawl. Moving parallel to the shore, Benedict rowed them toward a sea cave’s jagged, frothy mouth. He muttered a guiding charm to keep the skiff from wrecking. She was so proud of his magic. Her spell books had been left behind and she’d had to teach him from memory. They both had learned to write new spells, an arduous task for even the most talented of witches. The process had accelerated Benedict’s craft as well as strengthened her own abilities.

Carefully, she crawled over the side and waded the last bit to the narrow opening in the stone. She did not wave or even look as Benedict retreated. This was her burden to bear alone, a burden that had once been a gift. 

The sun, molting its reddish hue and ascending to gold, refracted over the water and bejeweled the wet walls of the cave. She unwrapped her still dry shawl and hooked it on a jagged rock a few feet above the floor. Stripping off her wet dress, she spread it with the skirt fully splayed. It wasn’t enough to cushion her knees as she lowered herself down but it was something. Very neatly, she curled up the hem of the fabric in a sodden lip. The mounded edge was slim, but it eased her desire for a nest. She’d become well-versed in the illusions of a successful heat. She knew just how to fake a nest without grass or blankets. And she’d found a rocking movement to answer her body’s breeding rhythm. She’d even learned to feign a knot to relieve a little of her anguish. As a sum, her efforts did not satisfy but they pacified her omega heart more than not.

Before they’d reached Laving, she’d left a trail of tattered sheets, clawed wooden walls, and her own bloodstains on the floor. The questions raised by her behavior led them to flee after each heat. Too many times she’d laid exhausted in the wagon bed, body and mind not yet recovered, and whispered to the sky, begging for her mate.

Two years ago, without much premeditation, she had said to her son, “We’ve never seen the sea.” That had been enough convincing, their journey then veered East.

Her heats passed more easily here. Inexplicably, living on the edge of what Rey knew to be the world, their lodging on the farthest rocky outcrop, felt closest to Kylo. As if the water that had originally brought him to her could bear him forth once more.

Her cheek, her forearms and her knees panged against the unforgiving stone beneath her as her arousal slipped from her cunt in a sticky stream. She rocked forward and backward in time with the pounding waves of the ocean, her body eagerly complying with the rhythm of an absent lover.

She held her fingers together tightly, prodding them into her cunt, fighting against her unrelenting muscles that disallowed entry. She screamed then, a sharp noise that bandied through the cave like a bat drunk on blood, as she shoved her hand in harder until the whole of it breached her opening. Drawing her hand into a fist, she pulsed the weight of it against the entrance it could not, in this thickened shape, exit through. It was a poor imitation of a knot but it appeased her, just for a moment, setting her body to milking a nonexistent come.

An extreme fatigue took her now, and she collapsed flat onto the cave floor. Unlike before, her dreams were not vivid manifestations of her desire but dark, hopeless plays of loss and absence. Beatrix’s shade often took form during these short reprieves, appearing as a wild, savage thing- Alpha without a mate. She growled and snarled, fighting against two chains that writhed snake-like.

When Rey woke, she started the whole process over again. She tidied her nest and positioned herself so she could take her fist. She bit the muscle of her upper arm, desperate to feel teeth on her flesh. The crashing of the waves hypnotizing her yearning mind, the cool sea air dampening the fever that sizzled across her skin. But the pain was still endless.

“My love,” she called out as she closed her eyes to find Kylo’s visage burning there. Her heart dared to bargain for reprieve, but the madness of her heat took her, her body moving on its own. 

A droplet from the cave roof splashed against her cheek and slid down into her mouth, acidic on her tongue. She raised up, first to her knees and then her feet, as her stomach panged with hunger. She gathered up her filthy dress and wrapped herself in her shawl that was no longer dry but not quite wet, just glazed by damp sea air. Her magic was nearly impossible to call up in her depleted state but still she summoned her voice to Ben’s ear. It wasn’t long before she saw him row into the cave. He had to climb into the water and carry her. Gently, he laid her across the bottom boards.

Her memory was blank until some hours later when she woke in bed. Bumblebee was laying in the crook of her elbow, his head pillowed by her breast. A fire roared in the hearth where Ben was bent over a sweet-smelling pot. 

“The sun won’t be up for another hour,” he said as she struggled to sit.

“All the more reason to get started.”

“We’ve waited this long. We can wait another day. It will take weeks before we even reach the edge of The Wilds.”

“We’ve been gone long enough,” she said as she pushed herself to stand.

The cart, laden with their few possessions, stood ready behind their horse. Rey, in defiance of her son, joined him on the seat. The horizon was changing from black to a silver grey. 

“I suppose we’ll head toward the tree line,” said Benedict, “But past the pines I’m unsure of the path to take.”

Rey removed a small blade that she kept in the pocket of her dress. She cut her fingertip and flicked her nail across the wound, a blood droplet casting onto the ground. “Home,” she simply said. A thin red line sprung from the spot where the blood had landed. The glistening line raced ahead of them turning and twisting towards the forest. Their path was marked. There was nothing left for them but to follow it and meet whatever lay beyond.

The sun was slinking low, painting red the tops of the beech trees they passed under. Rey was lost in her own thoughts of reunion, her body vibrating with both hope and fear, when Benedict’s knee bounced against her own. The rattle of the wagon was overpowered by his shaking. 

“Are you alright?” Rey asked, laying a hand over his leg in a futile attempt to still him.

“I’m sorry. I can’t help it,” his words came choppily through his chattering teeth.

“Are you cold?”

“No. I’m worried, Ma. A dead wolf. An empty hearth.”

“We’re almost there,” she said. She could think of nothing to say to undo his concern. She had put the prophecy out of her head since Benedict had read her tea leaves but now, she could not deny the anxiety it wrought. Her son was very talented and she did not doubt that he had read the signs correctly. 

At last they passed into the clearing that encircled their old home. Rey’s heart leapt to her throat before sinking low again. A thick brambly shrub had encroached upon the softer foliage, eclipsing both the clover and the knotgrass that arced out from the cottage door. One part of the garden wall had crumbled giving view to the weeds that overgrew within. It did not appear like anyone was living there at all. She swallowed heavily and flicked the reins to hurry on. Bumblebee climbed up from the wagon bed and joined them on the seat. He arched his back and hissed just once at which she stopped the horse.

She saw it then. Benedict’s breath caught in his lungs, betraying that he’d seen it too. A great, sun-whitened, wolf skull hung over the door. It’s eyes glowing amber.

“On foot then,” she said with weak confidence.

“But, Ma?” 

“Neither your father nor your sister could have laid this place with magic. There is nothing to fear.”

“But if someone else? Or the curse?”

Rey pulled her cloak tight around her neck. She too was worried but would not openly indulge it. They had come too far, endured too much. No talisman would delay her further. She hopped down from the wagon and when Benedict had joined her, they picked their way through the bramble.

She kept an eye on the wolf and its eerie burning eyes. She did not know what spell could have vivified the remains but she understood some trickery was afoot. They were almost to the door, the knotgrass woven with the bramble, growing thickly, tangled around her ankles and brushed heavily across her thighs.

The wolf howled then; a spookish, resplendent noise bellowing from its jaws. Benedict threw his arm across her chest, shepherding her behind him. She clutched her heart and stared intently at the skull. The howl strengthened in concert with the wind that was picking up.

“We need to leave here,” Benedict said, pulling her back towards the cart where the horse was prancing in place and Bumblebee was yowling.

But Rey could not leave, she could not turn away. “The eyes,” she said as she squinted, “They glint like little mirrors.” Defying her son’s grip, she moved closer still. The stark white of the skull yielded to the dim, empty openings of mouth, nose and eyes. The flickering dulled with the setting sun. 

“I think there is a yellowy metal reflecting the light,” she said without glancing back.

“It howls!” Benedict exclaimed as if that was proof enough of dark magic.

“A blacksmith’s trick, perhaps,” she said. Kylo was so clever. His metalwork a magic of its own. Rey grabbed a stick from the ground and prodded at the skull. It took quite some pressure, but eventually she dislodged it and caught it as it fell. “Look there,” she said using the stick to indicate a metal pipe that had held up the skull. There were several holes cut through it. The wind swelled again and now it was the pipe, still protruding from the house, that was howling overhead.

Carefully laying down the skull, she said, “We’ll bury her tonight.”

“You think Pa did this?” 

“I suspect so. To dissuade trespassers.” 

The door was locked but Rey undid it easily with an unlocking charm. Righteously, the hinges creaked, a sin that Kylo would never have permitted. Her heart began to pound. The untamed clearing had been discomforting, the skull unsettling, but the angry hinges were undeniable. Kylo was not here.

“Beatrix?” she called as she stepped across the threshold. The inside of the cottage was tidy, their possessions stowed away. The only thing amiss was a gnarled piece of parchment weighed down upon the table by a ceramic vase. Unfortunately, the paper bared the teeth-marks of industriously nesting mice. Rey laughed bitterly at that. If only Bumblebee had remained behind, the letter in full would have been legible. As it was, she could make out only three fragments of great importance. First was that it had been written two years ago, a few months before she and Benedict had arrived in Laving. Second, was that Kylo had left with Beatrix. The bit of parchment that appeared to explain why was completely torn away. The last was where they had gone. At least I know, she thought, but it did nothing to reassure her heart. They had gone to Farrows across the Nebula Sea.

It was an unusually hot autumn day, a warm wind singing through the wolf’s pipe that she’d left above the door. Rey was carrying a pail of water, to sate her and Benedict’s thirst while they reaped the last of the garden’s harvest. He hadn’t been spending much time at the cottage anymore. After helping to rebuild the garden wall and rethatch the roof, he’d left Rey to reclaim the clearing while he sought to make his own way in the village. His carpentry business was growing and he often slept in his workshop. But he was with her presently, and she was thankful for that.

The birds overhead quieted and Rey saw Benedict hastily climb over the garden wall, not bothering with the gate some yards away. He was looking to the distance that was blocked from her view by the cottage.

“What is it, Ben?” she called. Perhaps the deer had returned to finish feasting on the cabbages.

“Go inside!” he yelled. 

“What is-” 

“Ma!”

Rey dropped the pail of water and hurried forward until she too could see. A young woman with long, black hair to her waist and a young man with dark features approached.

Dropping to his knees, Benedict dug his fingers into the soil, and yelled out,

_“By earthen vow I summon wind_  
_To ceaseless blow hostiles confined_  
_If I err now this spell rescind_  
_And thus shall know intent be kind”_

A blistering hot wind swirled up around Benedict, flattening the grasses and nearly knocking Rey to the ground. The mass of air rushed towards the approaching couple and for a long moment stymied their advance. But just as quickly as the wind had been summoned it died so not even a single, fragile beech leaf fluttered.

Benedict stood; his shoulders still tight with mistrust but Rey held faith in his magic’s judgement.

“Beatrix?” she yelled.

“It’s me, Mama! It’s alright,” Beatrix said, “I won’t hurt you.”

“Oh Bea!” Rey replied, “I’ve missed you beyond belief!” Her words were wavy with tears.

Beatrix ran to her then and flung her arms around her mother. She shook as she too began to cry. She flung herself at Benedict next and hugged him tight as well before stepping back and grabbing the hand of the man who accompanied her. 

“This is Felix,” she said, her tear-stained cheeks flushing pink, “My husband.”

“Husband? Are you serious? Bea!” Benedict exclaimed, embracing her again and then pulling Felix to him as well. 

“Congratulations,” Rey said and welcomed Felix with a heartfelt smile. Then, no longer able to hold back, she asked, “And your father?”

“He stayed in Farrows,” Beatrix bit her lip. “Grandma is unwell.”

“Grandma?” Benedict said with eyebrows raised, “We have a grandma?”

“Yes. And she is very kind. She stood behind Papa when he insisted that I choose my own husband.”

“The Council wanted to arrange her marriage to the oldest omega male, an eccentric in his eighties,” said Felix with a chuckle. 

“A bit barbaric, no?” said Benedict to which Felix shrugged.

“It’s a common practice.”

“But Papa and Grandma would not allow it. They insisted I follow my heart. It was a whole year before I met Felix; and then we fell in love.” Beatrix squeezed Felix’s hand. She continued the story of her adventure, telling her brother about her harrowing journey across the sea, and about Farrows and their peculiar customs. She also tried and failed to explain the tangled intricacies of their relatives that she’d met. 

Rey listened patiently as bits of her full heart broke off. Beatrix, her sweet girl, was home again, safe and happy and intending to settle down. And Rey was overjoyed by that but still Kylo’s absence itched across her skin.

“Your father,” Rey whispered when the conversation finally fell into a lull, “When will he return?”

Beatrix dropped Felix’s hand and took hold of Rey. “I’m not sure,” she said. 

Rey’s steadfast resilience finally shattered. She had abided by the terms of another’s curse, lived exiled from her home, and sacrificed years that should have been spent with her family whole. Those acts, while arduous, had been consented to. An ever-growing amount of time without Kylo, however, was untenable. She had no patience left. The curse that had begun this all would have to end. She’d been left no choice.

“Enough standing about, you two must be tired from your travels,” she said, beckoning them to follow, “Let us go inside.”

The cottage was quite full that night. Rey had offered her room to Beatrix and Felix but they’d insisted that the twins’ old room with the matching beds would suit. Benedict was curled up with a contented Bumblebee on the settee in front of the fire. 

When she was certain that all were sleeping, Rey tiptoed through the living room, glancing at her son. As if he’d only been pretending to sleep, his eyes opened quickly, the flames coloring his pupils an unnatural hue.

“Can I come?” Benedict asked quietly. 

“That would be for the best. I need your help,” she said and waited for him to put on his boots and shirt.

Once outside Benedict turned towards the narrow path that led to the Hawthorn but Rey called him back.

“We’ll not be consulting anyone tonight,” she said, having stopped some paces into the clearing.

Benedict opened his mouth to reply but was stopped short by the creak of the front door. Rey had yet to oil it.

“What are you two doing?” Beatrix asked. Her hair was mussed from her pillow but her eyes were clear and her voice strong. She too hadn’t been asleep after all and Rey would have laughed at her misjudgment of her children if she hadn’t been so focused on the task ahead.

“Go back inside,” Benedict said but Rey shook her head at him and beckoned Beatrix forward.

“Join us. We have some spell work to accomplish,” Rey said, “A third can’t help but fortify our efforts.”

“While you were gone, I pored over your spell books, Mama,” Beatrix said uneasily, “I tried really hard but I couldn’t cast anything.”

“Desire is a necessity of magic,” Rey said, “With Ben and I both here, the spell should move through you as well. And just as important, it is you and I that carry the curse that I intend to consume.”

“Consume!” Benedict said with eyes wide, “That’s impossible! Eating a spell to stop it from ever being cast again is one thing. But to eat a curse that’s already set in motion? And without the original writing? It can’t be done.”

“I made myself omega,” Rey said, “I can call another’s curse into me.”

“Even so, you won’t be able to hold all of it!”

“You can’t understand, Benedict. You’re not omega. My body is a vessel, designed to hold the strength of another, to draw it out. I can do this. And I will.”

The twins just stared at one another, speaking as they so often had as children, with only their eyes. Finally Beatrix said, “Will this _undo_ us? Will I not be Alpha anymore?”

Rey smiled at the question; she had suspected that Beatrix had come to enjoy her unique position in the world. “No,” Rey said, “What has been done cannot be rescinded. But the curse will not be passed along. Now, enough talk. We have work to do.”

Rey pulled out a chisel from her pocket.

“You plan to file the curse’s joints?” Benedict asked.

“So clever, Ben, but no. It should prove to be an effective conduit as I once spilled your father’s blood with it.”

“What?” the twins exclaimed.

“A story for another time.”

Benedict questioned nervously, “Blood magic, with Pa’s blood?”

“Is that bad?” Beatrix asked, her eyes darting between her brother's and her mother's faces.

“With your own, it’s harmless but powerful,” Ben supplied, not giving Rey a chance to sweeten things, “but with another’s blood it’s dark magic.”

“Mine and your father’s blood are both yours. With you two here, we are quite safe,” she said it confidently despite the dregs of doubt she felt. 

She wouldn’t admit it out loud but what they were about to cast was beyond dangerous. A blood magic spell to summon, from a great distance, a soul long dead. Yet she knew no other way. She’d had six interminable years to think on why the Alpha curse had so deeply wounded her family, and why the Spirit Coven had not protected them despite ostensibly favoring both her and Benedict. Years of painful heats passed alone had given her clarity on the matter- she could endure the unendurable. And thus she was too strong. 

Until Beatrix had presented, Rey had lived happily in open defiance of a curse, designed by foreign magic, to make those it marked miserable. As both witch and omega she possessed unnatural talents of mind and body. The combination must have threatened the Horned God and the Spirit Coven and they had forsaken her. Old things always fear the new and the powerful are even more afraid of those that exceed them.

The irony was they had shown their hand. She now understood her position and had won the confidence to act. The desire burned in her; it was merely a matter of how and to figure that out she needed to know the true nature of the curse.

Pressing the sharp end of the chisel into the crux of her elbow, she pulled it across until blood was drawn. She could only hope that the red mess that pooled on her skin carried some of Kylo’s blood as well.

After returning the chisel to her pocket, Rey grasped hands with her children and shouted loudly to the sharp stars overhead-

_“Oh Curse Maker,_  
_Rise from blooded vein, Spin your tale to us_  
_Name your curse’s aim, Weave a bargain thus.”_

There was no familiar rush of enchanted wind or fiery heat, the natural world was oddly still. Rey’s self-assurance faltered for a moment but then Benedict’s grip bore heavily down on her hand, pulling her attention. His lips, gone white, silently mouthed, ‘Bea’ and Rey looked to her daughter. Beatrix’s eyelids were open wide but only two golden orbs without irises or whites were visible. Her mouth fell open then and an extraordinarily long red tongue unraveled like a ribbon.

“ _Listen_ ,” a silky voice said using Beatrix’s lungs but not her lips. The tongue darted about like it were cutting the shape of the words that now poured forth-

_“I Queen with profaned lips and tattered crown_  
_did beg my body to obey my King_  
_to heed the tides in which I nightly drowned_  
_to keenly seek the screams I could not sing_

_With artless power I bewitched myself_  
_so warmed my yielding loins with ardent lust_  
_and did replace my fear with faith heartfelt_  
_my pulse, now wolfish pant, tattooed my bust_

_Alas my wayward plea did save me not_  
_I died knowing the bane of my defeat_  
_so plagued am I in death by what I wrought_  
_my spell, I freely offer you to eat”_

A hot bubble of sadness thickened in Rey's throat. Omega had been only a desperate child not a vengeful sorceress. To curse her progeny had never been her intent. She had only meant to ease her own burden brought on by her father’s misdeeds. While Rey was hopeful now that Omega had offered her spell willingly, a spell as such cast only by desire, without written words, would be even more difficult to eat.

She closed her eyes and thought hard, willing her power to flow through her, to guide her tongue to form its own unwritten magic, forgoing the tradition of ink taken to paper behind. I am not only powerful, she thought, I am something new.

A thick drop of her blood pulsed from her arm and fell to the ground. It was then that Rey knew what she had to do.

_“My blood transmuted to cursed seed_  
_Sowed and well-tended will grow a tree_  
_From taproot to crown the fruit I’ll eat_  
_To relieve my heirs of rut and heat_  
_Wholly free of incestuous thrall_  
_By novel power I end this all_  
_With both goodly spell and lupine scream_  
_I witch, I omega, I Supreme!”_

Rey howled until her lungs burned and her cry gave way to her own gasping breaths. She felt it then, the power that had always been within her was vibrating. Her muscles strained and her bones creaked but she held steady. It was as if a great, white knife was attempting to flay through the centerline of her body but she did not let her mind falter from its focus.

Omega’s slippery voice once more trickled from Beatrix’s mouth-

_“I Queen Omega, Wolf of Witchery_  
_As I bestow my curse for you to keep_  
_Anon my wretched blood will grow your tree_  
_An earnest harvest you shall yearly reap!”_

The tongue broke free, pooling onto the ground where Rey’s blood had splattered, before it too seeped into the dirt. And just like that, Rey’s pain was gone and Beatrix’s eyes and mouth were her own again. Beatrix blinked at them and rolled her jaw before casting her eyes down. “Look!” she exclaimed. From within the dark spot where Omega’s tongue and Rey’s blood had landed, a thin woody shoot protruded from the earth, growing at a visible rate. The sapling’s growth only slowed when it was even with Rey’s neck.

“Where did that tree come from?” Beatrix asked which made Benedict laugh nervously. He hugged her and led her back to the cottage, explaining the bits she had missed and giving Rey a moment alone to recover.

Having settled her breath, Rey ran her fingers over the leaves that were now budding along the spindly branches. She had driven a curse from the loins of untold future generations and into a living thing that would, in time, become her feast. It occurred to her then that her power was only limited by what her imagination could conjure. She could, perhaps, bring Kylo home by sheer force of spell.

As soon as the thought occurred, she banished it. He had chosen to stay away. She would not deign to replace his will with her own. His choice was his and she would live with it. However, she thought with a growing hardness in her heart, she would not live by sitting still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this chapter. It was a challenge to write.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning in the end note for those who need it.

Rey had always lived her life in circles. The rolling seasons guided her as a witch. The cycles of her heat governed her omega body. And then there were the spirals of abandonment and belonging that moved in increments of several years. She knew this place of melancholy; she had lived here before. Beatrix’s return had propped Rey up but as surely as dawn gives to day and dusk to night, her abandonment brought her once more to her knees. 

She slept in the middle of the bed, curled up but still leaving little room on either side. The cottage was hers alone. Benedict still came to visit, his attachment to her unchanged in feeling, but it was his time to thrive, to grow roots as he reached taller and so she encouraged him to keep to the village more often. Beatrix and Felix, too, settled closer to civilization. Felix had a bakery and Beatrix vended special teas harvested from her prolific garden. Rey was happy for them but that did not preclude her from tending the wild vine of her own self-pity.

Beneath the Curse tree, Rey found Bumblebee dozing half in sun and half in shade. He would soon be apt to move fully back into the light and attendant warmth, but for now he was stretched across both realms so she joined him. 

“No sacrifices today, Bumblebee?” she asked, kneeling low to pet him. “No crickets? No mice? No snakes?”

His answer came as a contented purr. He was old and prone to napping, hunting hadn’t much magnetism for him these days. His offerings to her came now as cuddles and the occasional claw-crunched beetle. Regardless, she plied him with affection, rewarding him just for his companionship. 

“I love you unconditionally,” she said. She stood then and looked straight up into the Curse tree. The silken sunlight, filtered through the branches, graced her upturned face. There was no hunger in her but it didn’t matter, her task, unlike her magic, required not desire but merely action. She plucked a sizable fruit, the serrated frill on its bottom tickling her palm. With a grunt she broke open the tough, red rind, sticky juice slicking down her forearm. And she ate. She ate the hundreds of bloodlike drops within, each a curse that would have a child presenting as Alpha or omega if not for her. She spared the unborn as the red juice stained her lips and snuck from the corners of her mouth in two vampiric streams. 

When the fruit was gone, Rey turned to the cottage, kneeling just before the threshold. Underneath her, buried in the ground, was the skull of the she-wolf that had once been affixed above the door by a metal pipe. The empty windpipe, that still stuck out overhead, transformed the languid breeze into a portentous howl. Despite that it was not a wolf but metal, it resonated in her, breathing a spark across the tinder of her loins. She would have to work quickly.

With a quaking breath, she cleared her mind, preparing herself to cast. She no longer relied on careful transcriptions committed exactingly to memory. She merely had to concentrate on the tacit desire of her heart. Her lips and tongue then would produce the spell accordingly.

_“Wolfish wreath, tail to teeth_  
_Twine to me my comrade_  
_One as two, burden hewn_  
_Bind enduring dyad”_

A giant wolf, with black diaphanous fur, rose ghostly from the grave. She surrounded Rey, her body pressing tightly in a circle until she nipped the very tip of her tail between her teeth.

“That’ll do, Enso” Rey said, feeling an anxious weight lifted from her shoulders and laid over the wolf’s back. Enso was a manifestation of her omega self. By her spell, the anguish of her heat split between them; a burden divided evenly. It was a trick she had perfected since returning to The Wilds. As long as she kept calm, then the she-wolf’s presence allowed Rey to pass her heat in discomfort as opposed to agony. 

Enso and Rey walked aimlessly through the forest, neither leading nor following. The ground was soft from the rain the day before but only Rey had enough weight to leave footprints. As they winded their way together, her fingers tangled in the wolf’s fur, stroking along the gentle line of her backbone. The wolf was Rey and not Rey, a separation of sorts, one soul spun between two things. The allusion of companionship meant she could spend these frenetic few days of her cycle unconfined, in the open air.

A fat bumblebee, of the winged not padfooted variety, lazily flew across their path. Rey followed the small creature, curious to see where it was headed, towards flower or hive. She tracked it until it slipped between two trees grown so close that neither witch nor wolf could follow directly. Once on the other side, the fuzzy insect had vanished from view. 

Rey turned around and it was only then that she noticed where exactly they stood. Her breath caught low in her throat. A few feet to her left lay the great iron circle that Kylo had forged to honor their handfasting. She had not been here since that night. It was a sacred site that was not to be sought, only to be found sans intention. 

The center of the ironwork was filled with wilding tufts of knotgrass which was unsurprising. She’d worn it twisted in her braid that night and undoubtedly some of it had fallen from her hair. Even a single seed would have overtaken the native grasses through the intervening years. It wasn’t that entirely which caught her eye and moved her heartstrings by vibrato, rather it was the lavender. The trough running the top edge of the circle had been filled with a burning white flame during their marriage rite. Since then it had been reimagined. Someone had returned to this place, filled the trough with soil and planted lavender. 

A faint mist gathered in Rey’s eyes. It must have been Kylo’s hand that had transformed the ring into a planter. Lavender was her favored scent. A lifetime ago, she had folded sprigs of it in their sheets and distilled it into an oil to dab along her witch’s mark. A floral note rooted in the wet earth of her omega smell.

Kylo had not been real to her for a while; she kept his memory locked up. But here, where they’d tied their hands together and bound their souls forever, it was impossible to push him aside. He had claimed this place as theirs with his metalwork. In much the same way, they’d claimed each other that night, formalizing their love like sealing wax dripped upon the envelope of a valentine. Rey stepped over the iron sculpture, the tiny purple flowers pressing up under her skirt, dragging along the apex of her legs for a moment, before she stood in the center. Had he come here to feel close to her while she’d been away? Had he taken himself in hand, spread across this sylvan bed, breathing deeply of her scent?

Rey fell backwards onto the ground and Enso joined her, the animal settling at her feet. The odd intertwinement of fresh grass and fragrant flower thickened in the air. Her heat welled up, her remembrance of her Alpha hurrying it along. She kept to her back; she would roll over and mimic the movement of mating soon enough. For now she wished to test how much she and Enso could bear. She was feeling petulant. She wanted to concentrate her discomfort on remembrances of Kylo, punishing his shade for abandoning her. His absence was a wound she was not interested in healing, instead she encouraged it to fester. 

Finally, when the fever ascended to intolerable, she pushed onto her knees and stripped off her dress, tossing it aside. Crawling on all fours she began to form a nest, grabbing at the grass, vaguely weaving it in wide swaths as the wolf padded down stray sprigs with deliberate steps. Her nest was exceedingly pleasing. Her omega spirit sang an exaltation she had not heard in a very long time. The grass was dense and soft and the metal topped with lavender gave it a depth she had not instinctively understood before that she was missing. Slick was gushing out of her, coating the grass and helping it to stick. The grass was her bricks, her body providing a liquid mortar. Enso paced around Rey and panted. Soon Rey would need to take her fist but for now, her meditative mind kept her even.

Without warning, Kylo’s voice was in her head, calling her name. Louder than the forest’s hum, louder than her own ragged pants that betrayed her lustful state. “Rey!” the dream voice yelled.

“Rey!” Again, stridently, ricocheting off the trees and clanging into the metal belt around her. She must have fallen deeper into her heated madness than she had realized. The hallucination was quite insistent.

Two mourning doves flew off, forsaking their elegiac song at a sudden crashing through the woods. She cast her eyes about to reset her position in the world, to remember where she was and that she was, excepting Enso, alone. Despite her rejection of the voice, the sound of heavy footfalls and the furious displacement of branches persisted. A deer would not be so clumsy, and bears were not common in this tract.

“Rey!”

She pushed up onto her knees and saw the interloper. It was Kylo in the flesh! 

“Sweetheart!” he shouted. Flushed and wild-eyed, he lunged towards her. 

“No!” she screamed just as he was about to clear the metal ring. Her arm snapped out; her fingers splayed. “No,” she said again, more steadily, “Come no closer.”

Her words had always worked on him as strong as any magic, yet she still used her power to hold him back. The teary joy across his face dispersed but the hurt expression she anticipated did not emerge, rather, he schooled his countenance into blank surrender. She could see him clearly now that he stood motionless. The hair at his temples had a few fine threads of silver, his eyes, still depthless dark, were framed by feathered creases that she did not recognize. The ugly, bloody wound she’d given him when she’d seen him last had healed into a whitish scar. Beyond that, he was unchanged. He was ferocity and affection melded whole.

“Rey?” The earlier exclamation fell into a question whispered by wary lips. 

Her husband’s sudden presence cracked the concentration she needed to assuage her heat. Pain, expanding white hot from her bones, erupted beneath her skin. Her face crumpled and she couldn’t help but whimper.

"Let me,” he tried with an open palm outstretched.

“I can manage on my own.” 

It was taking every shred of her inner discipline to not drop onto her hands and knees and present herself to him. It was one thing to manipulate the intensity of her heat while her mind was fully focused on the task. It was quite another with her long-awaited Alpha mere feet away. Enso’s form, already translucent, began to quickly fade. 

“You’re in pain,” he said, his voice shaking against the restraint of her magic that corralled him from her. The forest had gone still, yet surely there were a few small and unseen woodland creatures witnessing their reunion. Rey knew no more what to make of the situation than any bee or bird. No animal would be able to deny the needy instinct that whirled within her but she was still human and she still had her pride.

Kylo’s scent, robust with his exertion, clawed into her throat. The front of his shirt was soaked with sweat and stuck to him, rising and falling with his labored breaths. The memory of his skin beneath her tongue, his arms snug around her waist and the satisfaction of his knot assaulted her mind. She cried out again.

Enso turned in three ever smaller circles like she were about to make her bed. The hurried movement roused the air between Rey and Kylo, swirling their scents- iron and wet earth, lavender and sweaty skin. Kylo shifted, and she noticed the bulge in the front of his pants. The last of Rey’s control was overcome and Enso disappeared before she could curl up on the ground. Without her companion, the full force of Rey’s heat came crashing back, she was no longer able to compartmentalize it. 

“Six years,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Beatrix needed a mate and-”

“Six years were agreed upon,” her words cutting across his, “But I came home to an empty hearth.”

“She was so lost, sweetheart,” he said. He was leaning against her spell, the heft of his body pressing upon her unseen shield. He was testing the boundary of both her will and her magic.

“You could have waited. Ben and I would have gone with.” The throbbing of her cunt competed for her attention. She did not know how much longer she could keep the safeguard spell from slipping. 

“You don’t understand; you weren’t here and-”

“And is that not the point!” Rey yelled; hot tears suddenly streaming down her cheeks as she began to shake erratically. “We agreed to six. I did not consent to losing you for two more!”

Like a spark to dry hay, Kylo’s demeanor caught her anger and erupted into flames. “Hate me!” he shouted, “Curse me tenfold! Forbid me from forgiveness. But do not make me stand here and watch you suffer!” 

Their two tempers, turned white-hot, combined and combusted, burning away her spell and his composure as easily as a summer sun burns away the morning dew. With the obvious faltering of his self-control, he pressed one hand to his face as his other roughly palmed his straining cock.

Likewise, she could not defy her omega-self any longer, nor did she care to. Rey fell onto her back and spread her legs. Slick pulsed out of her with each hideous stomach cramp. 

“I suffered when you couldn’t see,” she slurred as even speaking hurt, “But I should spare you the discomfort of witnessing it now?”

The seizing of her muscles radiated out from her core. It gnarled her hands and arched her back beyond a natural curve and forced her legs to kick hard against the ground. This was the most violent heat she’d ever had; punishment for denying a viable Alpha. She snatched at her nest, trying to keep her bearings as she rolled onto her front. But she misjudged her movement and rolled too far; her head cracked against the ironwork.

Kylo yelled a note of alarm. A rustling noise then betrayed that he’d entered her nest even though she’d not seen him do so. Her vision had been invaded by dense, white dots.

“Let me in,” he said as he cradled her in his arms, “Please.”

His hot breath felt cool to her scalding skin. Her hand touched his chest with a motion that was equal parts push and pull, one of her fingertips catching the ridge of his scar that cascaded from his face. “Don’t kiss me,” she said. The fight in her was gone beyond that one weak admonishment. She turned from him, this time landing on her forearms and shins, presenting her cunt. Silently, she asked for what she was too beleaguered to put properly into full sentences.

Kylo moved behind her with a hurried noise of clothing stripped away. A single finger stroked down her spine. Anger still roiled in her, popping acidic in her throat, but her body needed this, needed him. Alpha. Husband. Mate.

The head of his cock nudged futilely at her entrance. She was much too tight, her muscles doggedly contracting. Her body was not built for love. It was built to be a prize. She understood then what she had denied herself to think before- a pack of Alphas were meant to fight over her. No weaker male could enter her clenching cunt, only the strongest and most tenacious would succeed in penetration. 

In The Wilds, however, Kylo had no one to battle if she didn’t except herself. Her instincts, fanned by her abiding ire, urged her to crawl away, to make him prove his dominance. She tried to scramble to the far part of the iron ring but Kylo snatched her ankle and pulled her back, yanking her beneath him. He attempted to settle his mouth between her legs but she kicked out at his shoulder. He grabbed her behind the knee to keep her from knocking him off-balance. Twisting her hips, he turned her until she could see his eyes, his dark irises brimming with pupils that shimmered like wet ink. This thing between them was wildness and want, thick echoes of love that felt new and vital in their reverberation. 

He held her now, trapping her chest to chest, as he lowered his mouth to her neck but before he could even lick across her scarred mating mark, she wriggled once more onto her stomach. Finally relenting, she arched her ass up and buried her face in her arms. He’d been trying for tenderness, to play at normal sex despite her frantic rebuffs. But she did not need nor want tenderness. Instead she shook her hips at him, eliciting from him a hungry grunt.

Like a hot iron through silk, he forced himself in her so violently her flesh burned instead of tore. She screamed at the stabbing pain but her wails soon allayed into moans as he bucked into her cunt. He was whispering in her ear, descanting her name intermixed with praise. The witch in her still shrieked with displeasure but her omega body could not have been more satisfied. She writhed and gasped, slamming her hips back to meet his rhythm. His knot had yet to grow but he was filling her already, at the acme of each thrust the head of his cock panging against the entrance to her womb.

He fell forward onto his hands, his arms lively lines that framed her own. All the tension she’d been fighting, the long years of frustration, the denial of her true nature, transfigured into lust. She ground back on him, taking him as hard and rough as her lithe frame could manage. 

Her lips, fattened by the anxious chewing of her teeth, trembled. She tried to press them firmly closed but she lost herself in the moment and whimpered, “Kylo.”

“Rey!” he called back to her, the sudden swell of his knot stretching her to a forgotten limit.

A lovely ache beset her as her cunt set to milking him. Unlike the reprieve that she felt normally when he knotted her, it wound her tighter, his knot surging against her inner wall. Her tender flesh yielded to the throbbing of his pulse. The witch and omega were still at odds over whether to give in to bliss but it was the woman in her that dictated her movements as she quivered on her husband’s cock. Kylo’s muscles were still twitching and his chest waxed and waned with his ragged breaths but he managed to sneak a hand around her hips, his fingertips finding her clit.

He stroked her cruelly slow at first before relenting to her wordless pleas, increasing both the pace and the pressure of his touch. Pleasure welled inside her. The milking spasms of her cunt driving the intensity ever higher until it broke free. Her sharp, climaxing cry was dampened by her teeth burying into her upper arm. She hadn’t felt like this in years, and in some ways never. This mix of anger and persistent love fitted together like molten metal tracing the curves of an iron mold.

Gently, Kylo rubbed her cheek until she loosed her jaw. There were specks of blood in her mouth from where she had broken skin. Still bound together by his knot, he rotated onto his back, easing her along until her back was flush with his chest and the sky stretched out above them. A heady, hazy fatigue descended but Rey fought it off. She had questions that had yet to be satisfied.

“Why didn’t you come home with Beatrix?” she asked. She could not convey her rage so easily while wracked by aftershocks, but her hostile mood still bled through in her tone. She had expected him to hug her tighter, to press his lips to her neck or sigh contritely. Instead, despite still being fused below the waist, she felt him almost imperceptibly pull away. 

“My mother was ill and asked me to stay another month. But then, without Beatrix, it was like The Wilds became a place I’d never even been. I don’t know how to explain it.” He lapsed into silence. Rey, unwilling to make this easier on him, pressed an elbow sternly to his ribs. He grunted and then continued. “I became what I once was, before the war. Before I met you.”

“To the point now,” she said, “My patience is worn so low as to be beneath the ground.”

“When I was young, I was constantly ill at ease. I hated every Alpha that I knew because they were competition. That experience is quite normal. But I also despised omegas for how they made me feel- filled with want but still so hollow. When I came to The Wilds, I cast off that animosity like a snake shedding its skin.”

Rey knew all of this from various conversations strewn throughout their lives together. She was not exceedingly impressed by this explanation, yet she bit her tongue. 

“When I returned to Farrows,” Kylo continued, “it was like no time had passed at all. The acrid callouses of my youth regrew. And it wasn’t just a renewed hatred for every Alpha and omega- I relearned to hate myself. That man, the one I once was and the one I became again, was not worthy of you.”

“That was not a determination to which you were entitled,” she said, shoving her way through his account, “Not since we first laid together in this place, our hands knotted to each other’s. You had no right to keep away.”

“I know.”

“We all suffer under fate, Kylo. A witch’s path is not charmed. I would not expect an Alpha’s to be either.” Her voice had lost its venom and instead was wet with tears. She was so tired of the strings that danced them like marionettes, pulled by gods, spells and curses while concurrently compelled by bodies that bowed to beastly instinct. Kylo’s homecoming should have been only sweet; she resented the bitterness between them. 

“That is true, but it seems you’ve come to suffer under a fate that was meant to be mine alone.”

“Then why did you bother coming back at all?” 

“We don’t have magic in Farrows,” he began, “not the way you have it here. No one practices witchcraft.”

“I would beg to differ,” she interjected.

“Queen Omega was an anomaly yet to be repeated,” he said, “All the same, not long after Beatrix left Farrows, coming of age rites started to pass without new Alphas or omegas. The curse had come to an end and Farrows was made new.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I know it was your doing. No other witch would have cared enough to try. And I’ve seen enough of your craft to know that breaking a curse that you did not cast is extremely difficult; that there would be a price to pay. I hastened home because I was frightened for you.”

“Not everything has a dire consequence.”

“But everything has a counterpoint, does it not? Earth to rouse wind, water to set fire. What balances a curse?”

“A blessing.”

His face contorted in confusion. “I wouldn’t dare to presume…”

“Why not? You are my heart’s desire. And what else would have coaxed you back to me other than dark magic?” She had meant it as a caustic joke but it sounded so pathetic that she draped a hand over her eyes in embarrassment. Irony reared its clever head just then as Kylo’s softened knot slipped free from her cunt. This conversation was far from over but their bodies did not care. The primal call and answer took hold and petitioned each a role to play. Rey, on shaking limbs, bent low over the ground, the trampled knotgrass caressing her arms and legs. She kept her face away from him again, unwilling to offer any more than what he needed.

“Please,” Kylo whispered, “Not like this.”

“Like this or not at all.” 

He did not argue further, instead, he gave up any attempt at intimacy. Kneeling behind her, he gripped her waist as he thrust into her so abruptly she yowled. He rutted into her, his hips snapping frantically against her bottom. Woman and witch were locked away, only her omega-self compelled her now as she matched his every feral movement with her own. 

His cock pounded into her dripping cunt, threatening to rearrange her depths with his fervor. Despite it all she moaned. They were both just bones and muscles, merely blood and skin, but how could that account for the torrent of emotion between them? She wanted to want him simply. She wanted to give up her anger. She wanted his contrition to be enough but pride was a fickle thing and love even fickler. 

Kylo’s hand cupped her breast, his fingers pinching her nipple. The pinpoint of pleasure contrasted with the heavy press of his chest against her back. He covered her and cried out as his knot once again blew within her, locking them together while his come gushed into her receptive cunt.

He maneuvered them onto their sides. She could feel him waiting for her to succumb to sleep first, but she refused. She knew that if she slept, her body would betray her. Unguarded, she would seek comfort from his form. She would not give him that satisfaction. Obstinately, she kept her eyes wide open.

“Are you alright?” he asked after enough time had passed that it was obvious she was willfully keeping awake. She did not reply. He retreated by an inch, letting a puff of air pass between them, coaxing steam from across their sweaty skin. “I noticed your mark has changed.”

Instinctively, she placed a hand between her breasts, her fingertips skimming along the sacred geometry inked there. While it still changed colors on occasion, the usual gold of its static state now was constantly trimmed by a velvety black. 

“It morphed when I ascended to Supreme,” she said.

“Supreme?”

“I couldn’t break the curse as a simple witch. So I became new and more powerful.” To demonstrate, she held a hand upwards as she closed her eyes in concentration. She incanted,

_“With a twist of my wrist_  
_Show mastery o' balance_  
_Ascend high, frame the sky_  
_Know that I am talent”_

A second later the weighty iron ring, topped by lavender, began to spin before slowly lifting upward until it was suspended several feet above the ground. There was no manipulation of air and earth any more than of water or fire. The spell she’d used was not remembered but simply newly born from her mouth- a focused burst of Rey’s desire. Satisfied with her display, she settled the ring back down into its rut.

Uneasily, he asked, “At what cost, Rey?”

She angled herself so she, over her shoulder, could catch his eye. “That remains to be seen.”

It wasn’t much longer until his knot came free, soon followed by her renewed appetite to mate. Again and again they came together, omega honoring her heat and Alpha fulfilling his omega’s needs. At times she tried to crawl away or fend him off, but just as often she was the one who threw her hips back first to meet his. Between each rough coupling, were the short respites that should have been used to regain their strength, but Rey’s stubbornness kept them from sleeping. Thus each sleepless interval had them descending further into delirium as they exchanged terse details of their time apart.

It was during one of these fatigue-drunk reprieves that Kylo was first to pose a question. “Beatrix and Felix found their way?” he asked.

She nodded. She did not feel like talking. With their bodies recently disengaged, she was able to roll away from him, relishing the short moment to lay untouched.

“Benedict?” he prodded. Rey sighed. As indignant as she was, she could not deny Kylo news of his son.

“Quite happy,” she said, “You missed his handfasting by two months.”

“Is that so?” he responded in surprise.

“His husband’s name is Gil.”

“Ah, I see,” Kylo said, a genuine smile tugging at his tired mouth, “A love match then.”

“They have a small farm on the far side of the village. Gil tends the crops and Benedict has a carpentry shop not too far from your old forge.”

Kylo laid his arm outstretched towards her. If she mirrored his action their fingertips would touch, but she stayed unmoving, her arms flat to her side. From the corner of her eye, she saw him turn his head. His eyes were on her, examining every bit of her expression. She made no effort to return his gaze. 

“I understand that you may never forgive me,” he said quietly, “I know I betrayed your trust. But please believe me, I am deeply sorry.”

She said nothing in response but rolled onto her side and grabbed her ass, spreading herself as to display her most vulnerable bits to him. Any more explicit of a request was unnecessary. She did not forgive him yet but neither did she deny her need for him in her current state. He crawled to her and pushed his hard cock inside. She didn’t cry out; her walls having relaxed enough to take him without too much discomfort. He moved in her and Rey reached behind her to grip his upper thigh and hurry him along.

At last, after three days and nights, the pendulum of her heat did not circle back around. Rey took hold of the edge of the metal ring, thick sprigs of lavender rose between her fingers like an open, fitted hand. More than her Alpha’s knot or her husband’s declarations, it was this evidence of his actions in her absence that had her completely overcome by nostalgia for their love. His own longing heart had sowed her scent where their love had been explicitly professed. His devotion was undeniable.

“Is there anything I can do, sweetheart?” he asked as she scrubbed at her tear-wetted cheeks.

“I just want to go home,” she whispered back.

With the legs of a newborn fawn, she staggered to her feet. So unused to standing, her knees actually knocked together. Finally, with some semblance of balance, she pulled on her dress. It provided little in the way of modesty as her sweat-soaked skin kept the fabric flush with her every angle. Kylo, equally unsteady, dressed and then moved next to her. She was more than capable of walking unaided despite her exhaustion; she had foregone an arm to lean on years ago. She did not, however, have the stamina to bicker any longer. She allowed Kylo, at a little distance, to accompany her through the woods. 

Close to the cottage, they passed by a bag that had clearly been discarded earlier when Kylo had blindly pursued her through the trees. He, with audible effort, scooped it up and slung it over his shoulder before they wended on.

Just within the clearing, Rey felt a sudden burst of nerves. Entering the place they had lived together crystallized his return. He was not merely a dream fleshed out by her fevered mind. There would be practical matters to attend to, and perhaps a renegotiation of their relationship. She would always be omega to his Alpha, wife to him as equally as he was to her as a husband, but perhaps, despite how their bodies dovetailed, they were still too different. Could a blacksmith ever really give himself to a witch?

Kylo lengthened his stride to out-pace her. “Is that a Fallen Crown?” he asked as he laid a hand on the twisted bark of the Curse tree. “I’ve only seen these within Farrows, and only in King’s Grove.”

“Fallen Crown? How clever,” she said, seeing the namesake clearly in the serrated circle at the bottom of the fruit. “I’ve been calling it the Curse tree.”

Kylo was reaching up then to harvest a fruit when she said, _‘Curse tree’_ , and pulled his hand away. “Dare I ask?”

“Each seed represents a soul spared from Queen Omega’s curse. I must eat each one.”

He stared at her hard, his expression mostly flat, but she read two pieces in it- awe and fright.

“Is that safe?”

“Would it really matter to you?” she quipped as she picked a ripened, red fruit and stowed it in the pocket of her dress. 

She caught the flash of his wounded grimace and regretted her retort a bit. Bone-tired, she made her way to the cottage door; they had chased each other in too many circles and parried too many of each other’s blows. She longed for the uncomplicated comfort of her bed.

“May I come in?” he asked but his needy tenor betrayed his true meaning- _May I come home?_

As if on cue, the wolf’s windpipe howled across the clearing. Like a lonely skylark taken in by the song of a mockingbird, the wolfish wail stirred her exhausted omega heart. But she did not relent, her pride still too strong.

“This is my residence,” Rey said, “I live here alone.” 

“I am your husband.” His remark was neither a threat nor a plea.

“As you were in Farrows. I don’t see what’s changed. I can manage just as I did during your long absence,” she said.

Kylo nodded with closed eyes and then said quietly. “If I may, I have something I would like to give you.”

His hand went to a pocket on his pack but before he could produce his offering she said, “I never incur debts.” It was an echo of a sentiment she’d shared with him long ago when they’d first met. Rey stepped back and closed the door, the ill-tended hinges screaming with the sudden movement. 

Leaning with her back against the shuttered door, Rey could feel Kylo still standing there. She imagined he’d laid a hand atop the planks, willing her to let him in. But no matter how trapped he’d felt in Farrows, he hadn’t been physically impeded from returning to her. She waited silently some long minutes before she felt him move away. Then she waited even longer until she was certain he would be well out of view if, as sense would dictate, he had headed towards the village.

Rey opened the door. To her surprise, there was a small, leather-bound book balanced on the sill. The leather was the color of a well-worn saddle and the edges were not neatly cut but rather kept to the natural shape of the hide. A leather strap circled around it several times before fastening in a knot, holding the pages tight. She undid the strap and opened up the book. 

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. There, in what she knew to be Kylo’s elegant lettering, were pages upon pages of spells.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: The sex in this chapter is consensual but, due to Alpha/omega instincts and heightened emotions, it could be read as non-consensual e.g. Rey being pulled back by her ankle while trying to crawl away.

**Author's Note:**

> **  
>  [Moodboard](https://marymonster.tumblr.com/post/616465375589269504/the-knots-that-bind-by-marymonster-rey-is-a-witch)   
>  **


End file.
